Dear Campaign Drain,
We appreciate the push you have made during recent weeks to narrow the scope of the project and locate an argument. Your openness and honesty about the struggle involved in settling on an argument has allowed others in the class, including the professors, to contemplate the best methods for identifying, communicating, and supporting an argument with digital tools. We encourage you to continue reflection on this process in your papers.
For starters, you can use your welcome page more effectively by adding some representation of your argument. This is valuable real estate on the site–most readers will be starting their journey through your site here. Instead of just listing the four types of analysis you will be doing, give an indication of what you found. This will put readers on notice about what is coming their way.
Great image on the welcome page, but it needs to be properly sourced. It should also be given a caption that guides the reader in what to make of it, especially how it relates to your argument.
You have rounded up a good amount of useful data, but need to more explicitly link it to the argument. Now that you have nailed down the argument, you need to pass carefully back over the data and read what it says about consistency and the implications of varying patterns of consistency. Every time a new set of data is presented, you should give readers guidance on what they should take away from it.
Related to this, you need to assess the meaning of data collectively–throughout you should add your interpretation of the data given that you are studying it in conjunction with related data. Presented separately, you are limited in the amount of meaning that you can draw out of the data. If you add a statement for each data set that explains what it shows about your argument relative to the other sets, you will be getting much more mileage out of that data.
Your citations page would be most appropriately placed at the bottom of the navigation menu, as opposed to right after the welcome where you have it now. Superb job giving full citation information and breaking down the list into primary and secondary sources. Regarding your note at the bottom about doing your best to rule out biased sources: it is good to see you are thinking through this, although please know that the best historians routinely include biased sources–they just proceed carefully, taking the time to understand the bias and read the sources accordingly. If you had thrown out all biased sources you would be left without any campaign speeches, since a campaign speech by definition has a distinct bias!
You may want to combine your historical argent and historical question pages since they are both sparse, and closely relate to one another.
On the 2004 page, the introduction should be sharpened. You open with, “Bush’s campaign in 2004 — just like Obama’s in 2012 — delivered solid and clear message to the voters when we compare them to their opponents.” This goes beyond assessing the consistency of message, which is what you can back with the data. You then say, “Their campaigns were better organized and funded,” which also goes beyond your data. You continue: “They were able to reach voters with their consistent message. And that was their winning strategy.” This is closer, but even here be careful not to overstate the claim. Your argument is that a consistent message in public addresses is an indicator of strength. This is a more modest, but still important, claim. Phillip appropriately constrained the argument when you guys presented on Wednesday, and that sense of constraint needs to be distributed throughout what you present.
Much of the 2004 is presented as a comparison with 2012 throughout. There should be some mention to the site visitors indicating why this is all happening on the 2004 page? Where is Kerry on the 2004 page (we clearly told you earlier to include Kerry data)? Comparing Bush’s performance in 2004 to Obama’s in 2012 doesn’t have the same effect because they weren’t running against each other. You say at the end of the page, “This [the Fusion table] is just another great tool in our arsenal and allows us to compare two different approaches used by Bush and Kerry.” But data on Kerry has not been presented.
For the videos on the 2004 page, the viewer should be given some indication on what conclusion you drew after watching the videos. They want to hear your expert opinion on what the comparison says about your argument. If you want to hold this until after they view the videos, that is okay, but you should not leave the sources without any interpretation.
For the 2004 page Fusion Table, a clearer connection needs to be made between the geographic campaigning pattern and rhetorical consistency. The 2008 Fusion table presentation is stronger in that it includes information from both the Obama and McCain campaigns, and the surrounding text describes the consistency of locations for delivering economic messages, although still leaves the reader unclear about the connection between words spoken and the location of the audience. The same can be said of the spatial analysis on the 2012 page.
The 2008 page shows persuasively that messages were repeated verbatim, but leaves it to the viewer to decide what this means, especially in terms of your argument. How do we know that consistency is an indication of strength and not something else? How do we know that consistency of message swayed the polls and not other forces?
The 2012 page includes a series of good data sets, but without transition sentences and fleshed-out captions for graphics, readers are left to piece together the collective meaning. You should add a strong introduction, conclusion, and transitions between the posts. This will give you space to explore the connection between the data and your argument and walk readers through the data along a clearly laid path.
Your Results page is very weak. This is where you want to re-assert your argument, and communicate to readers the implications of your findings. What you currently have on this page jumps around, at times contradicting your argument.
Ultimately, you should work through these suggestions and make the changes you can in the time you have. What you choose not to change you can then address in your papers.
Best,
Luke and Tom
Dear Contra:
First of all, more than any other group you took advantage of the aesthetic possibilities of a publishing platform like Blogs@Baruch. William did a very nice job of describing the relationship between the “puzzle” of images that display on the front page and the various kinds of data you found to support the notion that it is problematic that the War on Drugs was absent from the 2012 election. You also did a nice job relying methodologically upon one of the primary themes of the course: the idea that historians need to become adept at “reading the silences,” at seeing the absence of something as historically significant and seeing value in investigating why this is the case. You do a good job of linking within your site, both to other sections and to footnotes. Your group clearly has an impressive grasp of the aesthetic and navigational potential of digital spaces.
You also have a fair amount of sources, and you have data from each of the areas that we examined in class– though, unlike other groups, you did not work with any data: you produced no charts, no maps, and did no data or text mining (it seems like you guys put the energy that could have been devoted to that into aesthetics, which is ok, but is a choice you should explain in your papers).
The most significant problem with your site, however, is the lack of an answer to your question. Saying that “there were a lot of reasons why the War on Drugs was absent” and then discussing a few is a very good beginning, but it doesn’t explain much, and doesn’t hold up as a historical argument. How are these elements related? How are they weighted against each other? What were the costs and benefits for each candidate of this situation? Even if you don’t have definitive evidence proving every connection (the “smoking gun” evidence Tom discussed with you during Monday’s class), you should deliver to the reader your best explanation about the reasons for the absence. You have spent more time with the sources than most, if not all, of your site audience. For this reason, you are prepared to give evidence-based explanations that will be valuable to the reader.
The homepage for the site is appealing, but the navigation is confusing– there’s no discernible order the way you’re presenting information. That’s okay methodologically — we certainly looked at a variety of models for navigation this semester — but it should be explained in an “About this Site” page linked at the top of the menu, and in your papers. There should be a certain amount of intentionality behind your design choices and your information architecture. Think about that some more, and reflect on it in your papers.
This page — https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/warondrugs/2012/12/04/disparities-in-policies-state-federal-international/ — is emblematic of both the strengths and weaknesses of your project. Good sources, and you interpret them, but you fail to connect them to an argument.
This page — https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/warondrugs/further-readings-interests/ — needs more details on the sources. Follow the model we laid out on our course blog.
Finally, you did a nice job in your presentation inviting feedback from your classmates, building upon our suggestion that your embrace the potential for doing advocacy around this kind of public history work. But comments sections are a simple, easy, and rather fickle method for that type of outreach. If, perhaps, you wished to develop this space in the future it would benefit from a much more built-out system of public outreach. That, along with an exploration of a) what additional kinds of data you would need to locate and b) how you would integrate it analytically with what you’ve already done would both be valuable components of your final papers.
Best,
Luke and Tom
Dear Net Politics,
It is exciting to see the separate parts of your project beginning to cohere into a single unit. With just a few hours more work, it can be tightened up significantly further. Below, we detail some strategies for doing this.
You have done a nice job introducing important differences between some of the candidates in a given year, but have not linked together your individual sections in enough places to highlight the changes across elections. By adding some short, carefully worded transition statements, you can transform a loose network of parts into a single body that communicates your argument.
Good work on both your site and in the presentation of clearly stating your historical question. You can add to the the continuity of your project by adding a concise statement of your argument to your home page. Do this with the same emphasis as your question. Hit the viewer right up front with it, at least in brief, so that it frames the upcoming data presentation for the reader.
Toward the end, you may wish to add a more elaborate discussion of the implications of your conclusions. Consider finishing with a conclusions page or section that viewers encounter after navigating through the election pages. This will bookend the case studies on both ends, leaving the reader with a clearly defined picture, as opposed to an open-ended presentation.
In both an introduction and conclusion, use language that emphasizes changes in the actions of the campaigns. Your question does not explicitly ask about change over time (although in the context of this course it seems to be implied). A bold (both metaphorically and in typeface!) statement of the argument will clear this ambiguity and prepare readers for case studies that reveal dramatic changes in both the technological landscape and campaigns’ ability to change course. Some of this is already on your front page, but it just needs to be sharpened.
In addition to clarifying your argument in your general introduction and conclusion, you want to have a through-line that carries your argument across the case studies. This can be done by adding some brief statements at the beginning and end of each election page, reminding the reader of your argument, and pointing out what is different about the election under discussion relative to the others in the project. These transitions help reader keep the argument in mind as you support it with your data.
For example, the 2004 page begins with a single line, “Different ways the 2004 presidential campaigns used the internet to connect with voters.” This is too general of a label for the posts that appear. Use a label that ties more directly into your argument so that readers are prepared from the first moment to see evidence for your argument unfold. At the beginning of the page, you should set the scene by characterizing, based on your analysis and interpretation of the sources, how social media was used in 2004. Just saying that there were “different ways” isn’t enough — be more precise. Collectively, the posts for 2004 show some serious technological challenges that inhibited using the internet for building social networks–this came across well during the presentation, but is a bit buried without a full introduction to the page.
For the 2008 page, you go directly into the posts without introduction. A short statement at the beginning that signals to the reader where this page stands relative to your argument will go a long way. A short statement at the end will set the stage for the upcoming 2012 page.
The 2012 page also lacks an introduction. Even a brief statement at the beginning will serve as a transition, indicating to the reader what type of change is occurring. Don’t assume that the audience knows how internet usage is different in 2012 than in 2008. Get the reader ready for data that is going to show how Obama’s team built on previous techniques to exploit the power of the internet at a whole new level and with a new systemic rigor.
Anton astutely pointed out during the presentation how daunting he found the large amount of data generated by and about the 2012 election (“Trouble with the abundance in front of me.”). However, he did not stop there. He showed that he is emerging from his deep dive into the data and making sense of it. By adding transitions (even as short as one sentence each) at strategic locations–beginning and ending each post, and even in between posts, you can ensure that readers who are coming to this topic brand new get the meanings that you have discovered clearly and quickly and do not get lost in the data.
The concluding paragraph on the 2012 page is a nice example of a conclusion. Although since it effectively serves as the final stop for a reader navigating through your project in chronological order, we recommend setting it off more boldly and then connected to a paragraph recapping your argument and what has been proven.
There were some great moments in all of your presentations when the candidates or their campaign staffs were described as agents of change. This brings the history alive and it forces the reader to think through the specific details of change along with you. For example, Anton’s description of Harper Reed. He serves as an example of a person who made very consequential decisions for the campaigns’ implementation of social media. Anton also did a nice job explaining how the use of Dashboard–a very specific change–had broad consequences. Another example is when Eli pointed out that Obama “made it a strategy” to connect via fifteen networks. This specificity makes it very clear that you understand, better than most, how and why the situation changed.
Be careful with sourcing. All images, charts, graphs, etc. should have a link to the original source as well as a caption specifying the source. Bibliographic information such as that listed at https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/netpolitics/2012/12/12/sources-2/ and https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/netpolitics/2012/12/01/sources/ in a string of links need to be fleshed out. As we discussed in class, we are flexible on the style, but the author, date, and basic public information need to be included. They should also include captions that give the reader a sense of how you interpret the meaning of the visual source.
Some design considerations that you might address in your paper: How could the right sidebar be adjusted to offer alternative access points to your data? Do you want viewers to have such alternatives, or do you want them to navigate in a linear path? If you decided on a linear trajectory, is it safe to assume readers will move from left to right across the top menus, or does this need to be more rigidly structured? Finally, along other lines, do you want comments on your home page? These can be turned off.
Finally: very nice job across the board employing data mining to recognize word patterns and displaying them via Wordle and Voyant.
Best,
Luke and Tom
Dear Instigators:
It’s clear you’ve done a lot of thinking, compiled a significant amount of sources, and have done an effective job of going to school on the debates in the elections you’ve selected. You also — in your presentation, and in our discussions inside and outside of class — have done a fine job articulating how we can understand the role of the debates in the elections you’ve examined. The notion of “momentum” is key to this.
Your site does not, however, do as effective a job as it might in making your case. It frankly looks like you guys ran out of time, which is understandable. But there are a few steps we feel you should take before moving on from this project. The best strategy for accomplishing this would be to work on how your argument is framed. Your site would benefit from an introduction and a conclusion, and would also benefit from referring to your overall argument about momentum throughout the site. Without already knowing this was your argument, it would be hard for us to discern it from the current state of your site.
You guys could also do a better job of contextualizing your data and sources, and also reading them with and against each other. The 1960 section presents an advertisement, but just kind of floats it out there. What does this ad mean, in relationship to the debates? Additionally for 1960, more data on the first debate — which Jordan notes is the most influential — would go a long way to making that case. This part of your argument is not clear until the end of that section. What other data do you have on this debate? More polls? Qualitative sources? Research into the campaign strategy following the debate?
For 1960, the integration of photos — the black and white against the black and white WordPress theme — looks fantastic. A good aesthetic choice.
For 1992, you could use more contextualization of the polling data for the first debate — it’s just kind of put out there. You could also use some data to make your point about the status of the candidates going into that debate. You also note: “Polls revealed that Perot had won the first debate and Bush was struggling.” What polls are you referring to? You mention Clinton took part in an “electronic town hall” before the debates. What is that? This is symptomatic of your larger tendency to miss potential connections between sources– those connections form the fibers of your argument, they pull everything together.
Love the screenshots of the iconic moments, but those need to be described for the reader. Tell us about them. Interpret them.
In the “synthesis” section, you say the debate was “full of name calling”… but where is that in the body of your presentation? Where’s your evidence? Where is the relationship to “momentum” in this section?
For 2012 — fantastic intro. We like what you did with social media in the Wordle, but it could use more analysis. Send us a link for the Gallup video and we’ll embed it for you. We could use closer analysis of what The Debate Pulse video of second debate shows us. The General Election interactive map isn’t visible. And the final post needs contextualization– your words, not just the data. The 2012 section is strong, but loses steam towards the end, and this ultimately leaves the project feeling very unfinished.
Overall, you guys can think a bit more about design components. Do you want comments on the front page (you can turn them off on selected pages/posts)?
And: we want to see a bibliography page. You guys have done a lot of research, and did a decent job of citing throughout. Create a page on your site to show what you did.
We think if you focus on these questions and put a few more hours into the site before the final due date, you’ll have something you can be very proud of.
Best,
Luke and Tom
Below you’ll see some feedback about your projects. We’ve asked you to take some specific steps that should not be too time consuming — another two hours or so per person in the group should enable you to make those changes. You can also use the feedback we’ve given to help you write your paper: we’ve asked you some questions about choices you made, or asked you to suggest possible routes this project might take in the future.
Remember that your papers are due by 11:59 pm on Thursday, December 20th. You should make any changes to your site by that time as well.
As always, we’re available to answer questions.
Best wishes,
Luke and Tom
Optional draft: email us a draft by 7pm on 12/17, and we will give you feedback by 7pm on 12/18.
Final paper due by 11:59pm 12/20: email the final paper to both instructors as an attachment (Thomas.Harbison at baruch.cuny.edu and Lucas.Waltzer at baruch.cuny.edu).
Your final paper should be 8-10 pages. In the paper, you will describe your contributions to the group project, detail the decisions your group made, and articulate how your group and your work individually drew upon the ideas we engaged during the course.
This is an essay. It should have an argument, and then evidence to support the argument.
Here are some questions to consider. You need not answer these directly, but thinking about them will give a structure to your essay, and help you find your argument.
- How did collaboration work — or fail to work — within your group?
- What audience did you envision for your project?
- What was the biggest challenge you (as an individual, as a group, or both) faced in doing this project?
- How did the notion of failure factor into your process?
- How did the methods of digital history change your approach to doing a historical project from previous projects you’ve done?
- If you could do the project over again, what changes would you make?
Historical Games and Simulations
- On Wednesday we are going to imagine a historical game based upon presidential elections. Come to class with one idea for how the historical content of your group project might be represented in this game.
Blogging and Group Work
- If you’re behind on your group project — and you should know who you are — use this time to make up lost ground.
- We will carve out at least half of Wednesday’s class for technical questions around the production of your final project. Post any questions that you know you would like us to answer to the course blog by 8 am.
- Revised presentation schedule
- Guide to writing the paper will be coming
- Information on Citation
- Textual analysis
- Where will your sites be located?
- Blogs@Baruch questions?
- Individual projects review
- Jeremiah McCall, “Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Criticism and Classroom Use,” Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 2012).
- What is meant by the notion of a “problem space”?
- What characterizes the analytical limits of the historical games McCall examines? How does this impact the potential value of these games as products of scholarship, or teaching and learning tools?
- “One absolutely should question whether the roles and goals selected for the players are historically legitimate.”
- “One can rightfully question why each and every element of the game is portrayed as it is. But these questions should not be divorced from the consideration of the problem space as a whole, especially the historical roles and goals conceptualized by the designers.”
- How do the qualities of historical game design intersect with and depart from the methods of doing scholarly or public history?
- “A variety of players with roles: we would term them actors or agents, but the idea of the past being full of people who had choices, made decisions, played roles, and mattered is certainly well within the norm for historical sensibilities.”
- “Players with goals: Games clarify goals; life obscures them …”
- “Players and actions in physical space: … teachers and students too easily and often forget that humans in the past (and present) operated in physical, spatial contexts.” (environmental context creates “constraints and affordances”).
- “Players with choices and strategies: Granted, philosophers can argue about whether anyone really has any choices whatsoever. Pragmatically speaking, however, historians speak in terms of choice and decisions. Furthermore, we as humans act and comprehend the world in terms of the choices we and others can make (even when we feel victimized and assign all the choice-making to those who seemingly harm us).”
- If we were to design a game about presidential elections, what might it look like?
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.
Social Media and History
Reading:
- Lauren Martin, “Archiving Tweets,” Cac.ophony.org. (Read post and comments).
- Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 2006.
- Bill LeFurgy, “Crowdsourcing the Civil War: Insights Interview with Nicole Saylor,” The Signal: Digital Preservation, December 6, 2011.
Blog Post by Wednesday 8 am:
- Each group is responsible for posting its argument to the blog, and description of the evidence that will support this argument.
- The group must then use the comments area of that post to discuss the various pieces of evidence you’ve found.
- See this as an ongoing process that will extend through the end of the week and to which the professors will chime in, but it absolutely must be started by 8 am Wednesday, and all members of the group must be involved. This will factor into the grade for your final project.
By 11:59 pm on Wednesday, November 21
Post your audio production (hosted on Soundcloud) to the course blog. Write an updated statement of at least 300 words about how this approach to storytelling might be used to make an historical argument. Be as precise and specific as you can, but also be imaginative about the directions you can go. Refer back to the comments we’ve left on your posts for class Monday, and to the discussion we had in class.
By 11:59 pm on Friday, November 23
Leave a substantive comment on the post of one of your classmates. This comment should ask a question or in some other way build upon the work of the original poster.
By 5:50 pm on Monday, November 26
The evolving possibilities of public history.
Read:
- Oscar Rosales Castañeda, “Writing Chicana/o History with the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
- Amanda Grace Sikarskie, “Citizen Scholars: Facebook and the Co-Creation of Knowledge,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
- Share with the class your updated inventory of assets and primary sources.
- Articulate, even in draft form, what your historical argument is.
We are three weeks away from when your final project is due. If we do not feel that you are making sufficient progress, we will require a more formal post prior to Wednesday’s class.
Ira Glass on Storytelling
- Building blocks
- Anecdote
- Moment of reflection
- Break away from conventional presentation of argument followed by evidence
- Hard to find a good story
- Kill the crappy stuff, failure ok
21 minutes
Discussion of Site Maps
- Group by group review
- Restatement of guiding historical questions
Watch:
Ira Glass on Storytelling, in four parts on YouTube:
Pt 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA
Pt 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6x7lOIsPE
Pt 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY
Pt 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baCJFAGEuJM
Group Work, post due by 8:00am on Wednesday:
Together as a group you should create a detailed site map that outlines the organization of the assets you presented in class for the last assignment. Remember that your project needs to cover the following areas: spatial history, data mining and analysis, textual analysis, and visual and aural culture. All four of these areas should be represented in your site map.
You may design and publish your site map outside of our class blog, but write a post with the map embedded (preferable) or linked to.
Your post should include the following:
- A statement of the historical question you’re examining in a single sentence
- A visual representation of how your final product will be organized for readers/viewers (this is the site map) — be as specific as you can about how users will navigate through the various forms of material you will present
- Reference to tools that will be employed to analyze data before it gets presented on your site
- Reference to tools that will be employed to display information on your site
- An up-to-date inventory of primary sources
Reading Review:
Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge: A Multimedia Essay to Accompany the December Issue of The American Historical Review.”
- Free write about the organization of this site
- Navigation?
- Methods of data analysis
- Means of media deployment?
Discsussion of Inventory of Assets
- Group by group review
- Restatement of guiding historical question
- Detail of inventory of assets
Next Steps
Reading:
- Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge: A Multimedia Essay to Accompany the December Issue of The American Historical Review.”
Group Work:
- Your group should be prepared to present a preliminary “inventory of assets” for your project; a list of sources (or potential sources that you will locate) that will propel your argument. Be sure that these sources represent our distribution areas of spatial history, data mining and analysis, textual analysis, and visual and aural culture.
Hi all: we’re looking forward to getting back to class tomorrow, and will be using this week to both explore the role of visual culture in the doing of digital history and to accelerate work on your projects. Please come to class prepared to discuss Joshua Brown, “History and the Web, From the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies and Interaction in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,” and Errol Morris, “Photography as a Weapon.”
I’m sure you’re aware that Baruch is closed on Monday. We still plan on allowing you to use Wednesday’s class time to meet with your groups. Prior to this, however, we’d like each group to post an updated research strategy to the the blog by 8 am on Wednesday. We will comment on these posts in detail, and each member of the group is responsible for offering substantive discussion of our responses in the comment section of that original post. Doing so will be part of your project grade.
Your blog post should offer the following in as much detail as possible:
- a statement of the historical question you seek to answer
- a review of how your group divides labor
- an overview of the data, archives, and other primary sources that you plan to use at this stage
- be sure that spatial history, data mining and analysis, textual analysis, and visual and aural culture are represented in this overview.
- an understanding of the chronological scope of your project. Ask yourself if the data will be broad enough to address your question, but also manageable within our timeframe for producing these projects.
Your meetings towards the end of the week should incorporate our responses, and then next week’s class sessions will be split between discussing readings — make sure you do them, there may be a quiz! — and establishing a structure and a set of tools for you to begin production of your project in earnest.
As always, let us know if you have any questions. Stay safe in the storm.
Luke and Tom
Reading:
- Joshua Brown, “History and the Web, From the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies and Interaction in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Rethinking History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 2004).
- Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge: A Multimedia Essay to Accompany the December Issue of The American Historical Review.”
- Explore Joshua Brown, Ithaca, A Graphic Novel in Several Parts.
Group:
- Your group should be prepared to present a “research strategy” to the class on Monday.
- This strategy should include the following:
- a statement of the historical question you seek to answer
- a review of how your group divides labor
- an overview of the data, archives, and other primary sources that you plan to use at the this stage
- be sure that spatial history, data mining and analysis, textual analysis, and visual and aural culture are represented in this overview.
- be sure you have a sense of the chronological scope of the data. Ask yourself if the data will be broad enough to address your question, but also manageable within our timeframe for producing these projects.
- This strategy should include the following:
[entry-title]
“The second presidential debate in graphs,” Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/17/the-second-presidential-debate-in-graphs/
Reading
- Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
Blog Post
- Post to blog by 8am on Wednesday 10/24 a link to an example of a powerful graphical representation of data. Say what data is being represented, and why you think it’s done in a powerful way.
Recent Comments