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The group name we decided on going with is, Contra. This will coincide with the theme for our project, The War on Drugs. For those unfamiliar with the specifics, this is a 40+ billion dollar a year mission that is funded by US tax dollars, and has been seen as infective at best. Many facets of our governments spending is coming into question, but why has such an expensive and largely inefficient program seemed to have fallen on the back burner of many discussions.
TWoD is extremely relevant to our society on a social and international level. Most people in prison are due to drug charges. Drugs affect every aspect of our life, from the legal to illegal. TWoD spans almost a hundred years and touches on conspiracies, economics, racism, and foreign policy. But it likely won’t even be mentioned during the presidential debates unlike the Reagan era, where it was a running platform.
Some difficulty may arise in our current method of communication through email. We have created a google doc that will hopefully give us the ability to collaboratively grow an idea from the same digital workspace. We’re undecided on what digital format were going to use for the project, but the recent creation of our google doc should aid greatly into a decision coming shortly.
This is the first time that I have actually collaborated on an assignment with my classmates. I have heard of people using drop boxes and Cloud storage to edit files but I have never worked with it firsthand.
For my contribution to the assignment, I defined the word passivity in relations to Digital History. Before I started, I looked up the definition of passivity on Merriam-Webster but I realized that the definition would not suffice for the purpose of Digital History. I re-read the prior assignments and even though it mentioned passivity very briefly, I was able to infer the author’s definition of passivity. I did further research and found another definition of the word from North Carolina State University’s Wiki page and I incorporated their definition with my own.
For what it’s worth, this assignment frustrated me a great deal. I tried to edit the doc file but it was being edited by the same person for over 40 minutes. As a suggestion to anyone who reads this blog entry, if we end up doing another collaboration assignment, please, please have your contribution written out before you decide to edit the document. Once you have everything written out, just copy and paste everything in. Save it and let another person contribute.
My contribution to the group document was providing the intial definition for flexibility which came from the text written by Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen. I first included a word for word definition as provided by the text, and then gave my own summary of how the two authors see the word, flexibility, relative to digital history. While doing this assignments I thought that having this be a group work allows me and others to view other people’s work, so that we can see how they formatted their contribution and use it to help us.
By September 3:
1) Join Digital History Group on Blogs@Baruch
- Log in at https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/
- Go to https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/groups/digital-history/
- Click “Join Group”
- From Digital History group page, choose “docs” tab and open “Digital History Lexicon”
- If you see a warning that someone else is editing the document, leave a comment with the phrase “insert as definition for…” and then come back and clean it up (or we will).
- Edit the document, either contributing, modifying, polishing, or illustrating with an exemplary link the key phrases listed in bold, or commenting on the doc using the comments interface below it.
3) Write a blog post of 250 or fewer words detailing the contributions/changes you made to the BuddyPress doc, and reflect on the constraints or possibilities for using this tool for collaborative work.
By September 5:
4) Create accounts, if you don’t already have them, on Twitter, Delicious, and Google (reader).
- Send a tweet with the hashtag #baruchdh, and save at least one digital history site to your Delicious account with the tag #baruchdh
5) Complete readings:
- 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.
- William Cronon, “Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World,” Perspectives on History, February 2012.
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