Assignment due next class

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.’

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