[entry-title]
Project and Posts Review:
- 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
Reading 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?
[entry-title]
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.’
[entry-title]
Announcements
- Progress Report emailed earlier today
- Parameters for final group project, individual paper, and group presentation
Audio Project Review
Social Media – Reading
- Oscar Rosales Castañeda, “Writing Chicana/o History with the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
- Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
- Project components
- oral histories
- films and slide shows
- research reports
- What is the place of historical argument (E.g., regarding segregation, diaspora, etc.) in this project?
- What is the role of collaboration in this project?
- How is this project social? How does it combine elements of social media with academic history?
- Amanda Grace Sikarskie, “Citizen Scholars: Facebook and the Co-Creation of Knowledge,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
- The Quilt Index
- Use of the term “Citizen Scholars”
- What is gained in crowd sourcing a project such as this? What is lost?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook for handling the social media aspect of this project?
- What role should “lay historians” have in producing history? What is the most effective relationship between lay and professional historians?
Final Project Progress Reports
[entry-title]
Audio project proposals
- Workshop selected posts
- Clarify instructions for production
Public History – Reading
Anne Trubek, “A City’s History, Made Mobile,” Yahoo News, June 6, 2012.
- What is public history?
- what are some of the tensions between public history and “academic history”?
- Cleveland Historical – mobile app
- Developed by the Center for Public History and the Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University
- Geo-located entries, GPS automatically locates text, photos, and videos
- Uses Omeka (4 minute “What is Omeka” video), Curatescape
- Community storytelling
- Wide collaboration across individuals, community organizations, educational institutions, etc.
- Review current state of project on Cleveland Historical website
- Related examples
Blogs@Baruch Q&A
Assignments
[entry-title]
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
[entry-title]
Discussion of Site Maps
- Group by group review
- Restatement of guiding historical questions
Reading Review:
Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” in Alan Rosenthal, ed., New Challenges for Documentary
- Documentary strategies and styles have a history
- Four major strategies presented, evaluating strengths and limitations
- Direct-address, Griersonian, off-screen narration
- Cinema verite, everyday lives, portable cameras, “transparent”
- Interview-oriented
- Self-reflexive, acknowledge documentaries have always been “forms of re-presentation”
- Question of “voice”
- Importance of balancing raw data with interpretation, linking evidence with argument (while providing proper context)
- Reading/Writing the silences
Next Steps
- GET CAUGHT UP.
[entry-title]
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
[entry-title]
Model Graphical Representations of Data Around Hurricane Sandy
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/03/before-after-hurricane-sandy-photos_n_2068996.html
- http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/gc_wmb/vxt/RT_ATLANTIC/SANDY18L/
- http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at201218.asp
- http://alert.mta.info/sites/default/files/pdf/hurricane_recovery_map_bw_Nov5midday.pdf
- https://twitter.com/ElBloombito
Reading
- “Our consciousness of the past is inextricably bound by pictures”
- Increase in pictorial archives because of digital media
- Images as evidence, not just extraneous/illuminate
- Cyberspace can be immersive, encyclopedic (based on database architecture)
- Navigating virtual space
- Integration of info vs linkage
- 19th century increase in pictures with text, Frank Leslie’s and Harpers
- Narrative and story telling
Errol Morris, “Photography as a Weapon.”
- Authenticity and manipulation of images
- http://fluxmachine.tumblr.com/
- Photographs can deceive in many ways (can be as simple as changed captions)
Group Work Updates
- Plagiarism review
[entry-title]
Model Graphical Representations of Data
- Student post reviews
- Other examples
Reading
- Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
- What does “hermeneutics” mean?
- New methods of interacting with data demand new transparency from historical presentation
- Process important (methodology)
- Why?
- What is potential cost to narrative history?
- What are data?
- Evidence for historical argument
- More than evidence: creation of data, interaction with data, interpretation of data
- Combining different kinds of datasets enables “new way to triangulate historical knowledge.” Is this new?
- “Historians must treat data as text….”
- Visualizing data
- “Aesthetic provocation”; dynamic process
- The “value of screwing around”: quantitative data more than just math and statistics: discovering, framing, identifying trends
- Failure
Group Work
[entry-title]
Maps
- Review what you’ve produced
- Theorize additional possibilities
Reading
- Edward Tufte, “PowerPoint is Evil,” Wired, September 2003.
- What is Tufte’s argument?
- The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation, by Peter Norvig
- Examples of well-presented data:
[entry-title]
Reading Review
William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities.”
- Goals
- Non-linear presentation of data
- Driven by paradox seen in secondary literature: “The difference slavery made is widely recognized to be profound and yet study after study has shown that slavery did little to create differences between North and South in voting patterns, wealth distributions, occupation levels, and other measurable indices.”
- Comparative Case Study
- Why these two counties?
- Mode of Presentation
- Strengths/Weaknesses of Essay
- Validity of question
- Strength of evidence
- Accuracy of interpretation and analysis of evidence
- Technologies (GIS, XML, SPSS)
- Data sets
Group Work
- Historicizing your topic
- Establish a plan for digesting the secondary sources you’ve identified as background reading on your topic by next Wednesday (and any others you’ll need to add).
- Make sure you have a communication system in place and a process for documenting all communication
Examples of Maps
[entry-title]
Group Projects:
- Secondary source: a book or article
- Sharing workload
- Will focus on group projects on Wednesday
“GIS often ends up emphasizing not the constructed-ness of space but rather its given-ness, which is fine if you are setting out to bomb something or go out to eat, but not so good if you are trying to understand a wider spectrum of human constructions of space over time.” – Richard White
Guest Speaker:
Prof. John Maciuika, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History, Baruch College.
Reading Review:
Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” Spatial History Lab: Working paper; Submitted February 1, 2010.
- The Spatial Turn
- Collaborative process of creating “visualizations”
- “Space itself is historical” [it is something that humans produce over time, especially through movement]
- Relation of representational space to actual space — can be revealed through layering of data
- Representations of space and representational space
- Mapping as a tool for *doing research,* not just communicating information
[entry-title]
Announcements
- Blog commenting: “The Magnificent Seven ds106 Comment Challenge“
Reading
James Grossman, “‘Big Data’: An Opportunity for Historians?” March 2012.
- Big Data
- “And because we [historians] look for stories—for ways of synthesizing diverse strands into narrative themes—we usually look for interactions among variables that to other eyes might not seem related.”
- Importance of collaboration: e.g., joining “the historian’s facility with sifting and contextualizing information to the computer scientist’s (or marketing professional’s) ability to generate and process data.”
Ted Underwood, “Where to start with text mining,” The Stone and the Shell, August 14, 2012
- “Quantitative analysis starts to make things easier only when we start working on a scale where it’s impossible for a human reader to hold everything in memory.”
- quantitative v. qualitative?
- Close reading v. distant reading
- OCR challenges with primary sources
- Wordle
- Tools? Some programming needed.
- “you can build complex arguments on a very simple foundation”
- What can we do?
- Categorize documents
- Contrast the vocabulary of different corpora
- Trace the history of particular features (words or phrases) over time (e.g. ngram viewer, Bookworm)
- Cluster features that tend to be associated in a given corpus of documents (aka topic modeling)
- Entity extraction
- Visualization (e.g. geographically, network graph)
Group Projects
Group 1
Caroline, Anton, Eli, Cameron, Leanardo
Group 2
Estevan, Tatsiana, Phillip, Jordan Burgos
Group 3 – Instigator
Felipe, Jordan Smith, Robert, Pablo
Group 4 – Contra
Guang, Cary, William, Stephen, Shaif
[entry-title]
Announcements
- No class Monday.
Reading
- Thiemer, Brier and Brown, “A Practical Guide to Collaborative Documentation in the Digital Age”
- Compare the processes: http://911digitalarchive.org/ and http://braceroarchive.org/
- Key concepts
- An archive or a collection?
- “archivist-historians”
- born-digital vs. digitized acquisitions
- inequality of access to digital media
- review different methods of inputting information: text and image scans, emails, websites, listservs, text via form on site, images and video via upload, call-in system, collaborations with other collectors (e.g. Sonic Memorial Project and Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs), digital and analog interviews and sound recordings (including collaborations with Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, and the Chinatown Documentation Project
- Insuring a range of perspectives
- Challenges: more standardized open-source database and web publishing platform, more complete metadata, redesigned web site, permanent archival home (expected to turn over to LOC in 2013), 508(c).
- Quotes from the Bracero Historical Archive that are useful for planning your group project
- “First, decide what kind of collaboration you wish to have, since that decision informs the rest of the process, from technical to communication considerations. If your partners will merely be commenting on each others’ work, you can afford to think more about ways to share files and accommodate the comment process.”
- “If your partners will each be contributing work to the project, or if there are task- sharing aspects to your project, you must also ensure that partners have the ability to contribute efficiently and that you can hold each other accountable for your contributions.”
- “Make sure each partner understands exactly what their contributions are, and when those contributions are due. You will use meetings or other communications to manage those deliverables, but it is crucial that all partners are agreeing to the same thing.”
- “Flexibility is key. No project is able to anticipate all problems or challenges before they occur, but simply acknowledging that challenges may arise, and allowing time and budget for those challenges is helpful. For example, deciding as a partnership that in the event of an unanticipated technical problem, Partner A will take the lead in resolving it, means that you will not lose valuable time assigning that responsibility at a critical moment.”
Group Project Breakout Discussions
Group 1
Caroline, Anton, Eli, Cameron, Leanardo
Group 2
Estevan, Tatsiana, Phillip, Jordan Burgos
Group 3
Felipe, Jordan Smith, Robert, Pablo
Group 4
Guang, Cary, William, Stephen, Shaif
[entry-title]
Announcements
- Watch the presidential and vice-presidential debates at Baruch
- Categorizing posts!
Blog Posts Review
- Various shades of primary sources
- Read every type of source in a range of ways
- How do we assess the credibility of sources?
- Agency and causation
- Precision
- From sources to an argument
Reading
James Grossman, “‘Big Data’: An Opportunity for Historians?” March 2012.
- Free write: what is the difference between an “archive” and a “collection”?
- Key Concepts:
- Archive vs. collection
- Provenance
- Original order
- Collective control
- Authenticity
“Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control.
Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown, The September 11 Digital Archive: Saving the Histories of September 11, 2001, Radical History Review, Fall 2011.
- http://911digitalarchive.org/
- key concepts
- Is this an archive or a collection?
- “archivist-historians”
- born-digital vs. scanned acquisitions
- inequality of access to digital media
- review different methods of inputting information: text and image scans, emails, websites, listservs, text via form on site, images and video via upload, call-in system, collaborations with other collectors (e.g. Sonic Memorial Project and Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs), digital and analog interviews and sound recordings (including collaborations with Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, and the Chinatown Documentation Project;
- perspectives of “ordinary” people
- challenges ahead: more standardized open-source database and web publishing platform, more complete metadata, redesigned web site, permanent archival home (expected to turn over to LOC in 2013)
Group Project
Group 1
Caroline, Anton, Eli, Cameron, Leanardo
Group 2
Estevan, Tatsiana, Phillip, Jordan Burgos
Group 3
Felipe, Jordan Smith, Robert, Pablo
Group 4
Guang, Cary, William, Stephen, Shaif
[entry-title]
Blog Posts Review
- Primary vs. secondary sources
- Categories
- Logistical challenges?
- Conceptual challenges?
- Models
from Sam Wineburg, “Thinking Like a Historian,” TPS Quarterly.
- Sourcing: Think about a document’s author and its creation.
- Contextualizing: Situate the document and its events in time and place.
- Close reading: Carefully consider what the document says and the language used to say it.
- Using Background Knowledge: Use historical information and knowledge to read and understand the document.
- Reading the Silences: Identify what has been left out or is missing from the document by asking questions of its account.
- Corroborating: Ask questions about important details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement.
- Ask students how they could proceed with this historical investigation: What questions arise, after careful reading and interpretation of the document? What other primary sources might corroborate or refute this interpretation? Have students discuss their responses in pairs and then share with the class.
Reading
Kate Theimer, “Archives in Context and as Context,” Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 2012)
- Free write: what is the difference between an “archive” and a “collection”?
- Key Concepts:
- Archive vs. collection
- Provenance
- Original order
- Collective control
- Authenticity
- “Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control.”
[entry-title]
Review Assignment
- Twitter conversations
- Blog posts
- Take aways from this assignment
- blogging best practices
- what is historical analysis?
- what does it mean to construct an argument?
- missing from responses: notion of network ethics, strong statements on “the commons.” Why?
Readings for Today
- Sam Wineburg, “Thinking Like a Historian,” TPS Quarterly.
- Key Concepts:
- Reading documents: author, context, time period—that form a mental framework for the details to follow. Most important of all, these questions transform the act of reading from passive reception to an engaged and passionate interrogation.
- Sourcing: Think about a document’s author and its creation.
- Contextualizing: Situate the document and its events in time and place.
- Close reading: Carefully consider what the document says and the language used to say it.
- Using Background Knowledge: Use historical information and knowledge to read and understand the document.
- Reading the Silences: Identify what has been left out or is missing from the document by asking questions of its account.
- Corroborating: Ask questions about important details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement
- Key Concepts:
- Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History, “Collecting History Online.”
- Key Concepts:
- Traditional archives v. Online
- Interactivity
- Preservation
- Born Digital v. Digitized
- Intellectual Property/Privacy/Authenticity
- Key Concepts:
[entry-title]
Tool Reviews, continued
- RSS/Google Reader
- Subscribe to Luke’s Politics Bundle
Key Ideas from Monday
- public domain, fair use, The Commons
Reading Review
- Reconstruct the project
- technologies used: the archive, WordPress, Wikipedia, YouTube, the network, Reddit
- Ethical implications of the project
- Was this a prank or a hoax?
- 2008 v 20012
Prep for Next Week
- Beginning discussion of contours of projects
- DS106.US
[entry-title]
Review
- Wikipedia assignment
- Some preliminary thoughts about collaboration
Intellectual Property and Ethics
- Eric Faden, “A Fair(y) Use Tale”
- Cohen and Rosenzweig, “Owning the Past”
- Focused Freewrite: what is the relationship between fair use and digital history?
- Define keywords:
- “The Commons,” Creative Commons, public domain, fair use, DMCA/SOPA.
Illustrative Quotes:
Tool Review
- Delicious (and other social bookmarking tools)
- Google Reader
- Zotero
- Instapaper
[entry-title]
- Note on reading and assignments: DO THEM.
- Citation and plagiarism
- Notes on formatting blog posts
THE BLOCK QUOTE: Banksy in polaroid est pour-over letterpress. Put a bird on it blog vegan reprehenderit. Fanny pack marfa leggings locavore next level +1. Craft beer typewriter twee messenger bag duis. Mixtape odd future ex farm-to-table pork belly, sriracha nostrud lomo flexitarian 3 wolf moon american apparel. Direct trade labore lo-fi fingerstache, umami sartorial vinyl fap chambray tempor pop-up master cleanse aute placeat cred. Qui high life mlkshk odd future cupidatat, artisan kogi seitan typewriter magna jean shorts.
- Titles!
- LEXICON:
- Review of edits to the document, historicize these ideas
- Assess process of joining group, creating lexicon doc
- Readings review — pull out main themes:
- William Cronon, “Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World,” Perspectives on History, February 2012.
- 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.
- What can we learn about authority, authenticity, voice, research, community, collaboration from the ways that wikipedia works? The ways in which it has been built? The power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing?
- Looking back to lexicon: what can we say about Wikipedia using our lexicon (from Cohen and Rosenzweig and as developed in Google doc)?
- Examine the way sources are cited/credited in Wikipedia
- Tools review
- Logistical questions?
- Twitter: look at #baruchdh
- Delicious: look at #baruchdh
- Reader: discuss?
Recent Comments