Digital History Lexicon
In the BuddyPress.doc “Digital History Lexicon” document, we were asked by the professors to define terms associate with digital history. This was a new experience for me because this is the first time I was ever assign with a task to edit a document with my peers.
When I first visited the BuddyPress doc page, I saw a lot of the words has been fill out except for hypertextuality/ nonlinearity, so I decide define it, by rereading Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, 2005, “Introduction,”. Next, I gave an example of hypertextuality by creating a link from that page to facebook.com. Following that I decide to add to inaccessibility because I felt like there’s could be said on that word.
I believe that using this tool for collaborative work has both negative and positive. The positive is that the different view people bring to the table. The diversity of people can bring a new perspective on an idea and issues or in this case, a definition of a word and the concept the author uses it in. The negative of this tool is that only one person is able to edit it at a time. It’s a negative because if everyone log on at the same time to edit the document, it would create long wait. Like traffic, no one likes to wait.
Overall, I find that editing the document with my fellow peers is an interesting and new experience.
This exercise was a great learning experience and immediately made me think profoundly about what each individual can do to build on history. It amazing how students years from now will read these blog posts and use it as a tool to aid in their own research of history, and build on their own education. When I sat down to do this assignment, I chose passivity as my word. I looked up the word “passive” and saw that it meant one’s acceptance or allowance of something another does or says without an active response or resistance. Immediately, I thought about what goes on in politics and in general elections where the mass majority of voters, according to CNN polls, vote based on promises that cannot be reasonably fulfilled. That is why I explained how online users are not quick to question the content of the data found online. A program on the Sci-Fi channels says, “Question everything”. This is surely a good piece of advice for everyone, especially online users of history in the digital age.
Thanks, Guang Yi, for your reflections on co-editing the shared lexicon document. I am pleased to hear that you learned from the experience. I like to see that you introduced Facebook as an example of hypertextuality since this is a tool that so many of us are familiar with (but a service just recently launched when Cohen and Rosenzweig published the chapters we read). I encourage you to think more deeply about how the flow of data between Facebook users serves as a model (positive or negative) for how historical scholarship should and can be done with social networking tools. To Cohen and Rosenzweig, the ability to add links to a piece of historical scholarship means much more than just convenience–it can potentially profoundly change the relationship between the information in the linked sources (and the authors of those sources).