Reading:
Jeremiah McCall, “Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Criticism and Classroom Use,” Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 2012).
- When you come to class, be ready to discuss what Jeremiah McCall’s argument is.
- Do you play video games that have historical content?
- If you were to design a historical game, what might it look like?
Group Blog Post(s)
1. By midnight Saturday, we need to see each group’s working bibliography. We’ve previously called this an inventory of artifacts, but now want a more formal and thorough presentation of your sources. This will be necessary for your final project anyway, so this gives you an opportunity to get started on it now.
- The list should be broken up into primary and secondary sources.
- It should not merely be a list of links. Write out who the author is, what the name of the source is, where you found it, when it was published. If it’s online, include a link.
- Examples:
- Here are two examples of citations for online sources:
- “McDonald’s Happy Meal Toy Safety Facts,” McDonald’s Corporation, accessed July 19, 2008, http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/about/factsheets.html.
- Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History, Vol. 93, No. 1 (June, 2006): 117-46.
- Click here for an example of a bibliography with resources broken up by type.
- Here are two examples of citations for online sources:
- You may either post this to the blog, or email it to the professors. This assignment will factor into your group grade.
2. By midnight Sunday, your group must post to the blog a description of how your final project is fulfilling the distribution requirements. Remember, your projects must combine spatial history, data mining and analysis, textual analysis, and visual and aural artifacts.
- Be as precise as you can in your description. If you are creating a map, say how it is helping articulate or visualize your argument. If you are using maps created by others, say why you’re doing so and what it adds to your argument. What is the data that you’re using in your mining, analysis, or visualization? Etc.
- We will respond to these posts Monday morning. Be sure to read our responses prior to class on Monday.
Group Project discussion
Reading on Social Media and History
- Lauren Martin, “Archiving Tweets,” Cac.ophony.org. (Read post and comments).
- “Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress”
- “… Do you think tweets are something worth archiving? Are there privacy concerns? Will knowledge that your tweets will be archived change the nature of what you write? Any other thoughts or concerns?”
- “Uncle Fred’s tweet about his failed sandwich won’t be noteworthy in isolation; but, as part part of say, a complex database compiled from millions of tweets about food habits cross-checked against location and date, I could see it being part of a scholarly argument.”
- Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 2006.
- Examples: iStockphoto, VH1, InnoCentive (“solvers”)
- Factors: Power of the crowd, low barrier of entry
- Questions: Which problems/questions require full time professionals to solve? Which are better solved by hobbyists?
- Bill LeFurgy, “Crowdsourcing the Civil War: Insights Interview with Nicole Saylor,” The Signal: Digital Preservation, December 6, 2011.
- Interview of Nicole Saylor, head of Digital Library Services at the University of Iowa Libraries
- Civil War Diaries and Letters project
- Crowd sourcing transcription
- Scripto (CHNM)
- Modeled on Zooniverse
- Importance of acknowledgement and rewards for transcribers
- “I really like how Sharon Leon, a historian at George Mason University, addressed that question in a New York Times article. ‘We’re not looking for perfect,’ she said. ‘We’re looking for progressive improvement, which is a completely different goal from someone who is creating a letter-press edition.’
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