lovehistory.net

Where to start this week?

I’ve always enjoyed working with fonts – I have a special weakness for grunge fonts, unfortunately – but I’m not sure I’ve ever been very good at it. Therefore I found this week’s readings, the film Helvetica, and the lynda.com tutorial Typography for Web Designers to be very helpful in understanding why designers make the decisions they do concerning fonts. It is scientific and mathematical as opposed to simply artistic, and it is also historical. Without a basic understanding of all of these elements, it is much more difficult to use fonts properly.

I tried to put some of the principles into practice when I worked on designing my portfolio project – I’d never thought closely about using fonts to establish visual hierarchies as well as meaning on the page – to me hierarchy had to do with placement of elements and the way fonts looked was incidental – a decision based on gut feeling more than anything else. I’d also never thought about how variation within the same font is just as important and powerful as variation between fonts. As is such, I kept my font selections simple in my initial design for my portfolio site and instead played with italics, sizes, and weights to create visual difference on my page (and to direct visual flow, as discussed in White Space is Not Your Enemy). I watched the lynda.com videos on embedding fonts and found them to be very exciting, but I have not yet tried this technique on my own site.

One thing I struggled with was the logo. I know it is best to have not only text-based navigation, but a text-based header. A properly chosen and stylized font can give the same appearance of an image. And I know at this point that logos created in Photoshop must be viewed as blueprints. But at this stage I was unable to figure out using Dreamweaver how to layer text over my image, which I know is possible using CSS. So I uploaded the JPEG logo with text as a placeholder of sorts to demonstrate my planned intention.

To explain the logo: I chose the font Neuva STD because I think it looks right for the 1950s period of the image, and I chose to italicize the text and add an exclamation mark to mimic the ebullient advertising copy of the day. The image itself I purchased from iStockphoto.com. I’m not sure yet what my CLIO II personal project will be, but I’m hoping it will have something to do with domesticity in America in the 1950s (my areas of study are more thoroughly explained on my About Me page), so I selected an image representative of that time period. The color scheme on the page is also meant to reflect the time period. The yellow reminds me of the color of the refrigerator we had while I was growing up. Even if my CLIO II project ends up having to do with a different time period (as it very well might due to copyright restrictions), I can still use this image and concept at a later date. To me this future usability justified both purchasing the image and building a design around the related concept.

The size of the text in the body is 1em, which I know might feel “horsey” in terms of design, but I’d like to leave it for now. I tried designing with a smaller font and didn’t quite like the look. I think the larger font almost gives the page a more playful feel, in line with the aesthetic I was trying to convey in the image. Also, I get migraines reading small text on computers, so it was just easier for me to work with the larger font. I’m biased, I admit it. The navigation, in contrast, is smaller and italicized, a visual contrast I liked. I also chose to right align my validation badges in the footer to balance all the elements that are on the right side of the page at the top. Adding simple borders between the header, footer, and body served to break up the content without creating distracting chunks of color. I tried designing with different background colors and found I preferred the simple, clean look of a uniform background.

Wow! I did not intend to spend so much time in my blog talking about my design process but it took up a lot of frustrating and fascinating time. And what was most interesting to me was that I couldn’t move forward with other elements of the design until I was happy with the fonts, especially after the deluge of information about them. I scrapped my page three times before getting it right, and that third time the first thing I did was figure out the fonts. After that everything else seemed to flow into place.

Coincidentally, by that time I was much further along in the lynda.com tutorial. What I learned more than anything else from those videos is the importance of working with your fonts as design elements and not as text. Viewing the tutor using the fonts in word processing software to test them out PRIOR to putting them into her code blew my mind. It reminded me of how I sometimes “draw” websites in Photoshop before I try to code them (like the logo I made for this one). Visualizing fonts in this way really helped me when I went back to recode my own page. I love working with Photoshop – drawing there makes things much easier. In the future I will try to draw with fonts as well.

I found Thinking with Type to be most useful in terms not only of the way it historicized fonts and types, but in all the visual examples it provided of type in action. Simply looking at other uses of type helped me understand again that type is not just text, it is a design element. And it also helped my own thinking to see the many, many different ways people use type, and the many different kinds they use.

That thought brings me to Helvetica. I have nothing against Helvetica the font, but as I watched the film I found myself most identifying with the designers who hate Helvetica and search for other ways to use type. Then again, as I said, I love a good grunge font. But the longer the film went on, the more static and ubiquitous Helvetica became. I knew it was popular and beloved but I didn’t know just how pervasive it is. It also made me think of my own experiences with Helvetica. I’ve never been able to use it my own design (here I am mostly referring to images and text together) and have it look right. Here it is, this clean and simple font, and I am usually very minimalist in my own photography, and I just can’t make it work. It always look wrong. It could have to do with other things, like the way I am styling the text with effects like drop shadow or playing with the fill settings, or even the words I am trying to use with the image. But it’s really not always as easy as it might look to design with Helvetica and have it turn out as satisfying as it can be. Then again, my favorite sans-serif is Futura, so maybe I’m biased.

In any case, I’m looking forward to actually trying font embedding in my own site, and to figuring out a way to perfect my logo. All and all an interesting week.

Edit: This week I have commented on Sheri and Richard’s blogs.

I’ll admit to being pretty captivated by White Space is Not Your Enemy. Whether I’m good at it or not, I love design, and the book had me so keyed up I kept having to put it down move to my computer so that I could test out the ideas contained in its pages (the font chapter, in particular, proved a huge distraction). In other words, I couldn’t wait to start drawing.

I have never thought of myself as a visual artist. I can barely draw a recognizable stick figure with pen and paper (or cursor and MS Paint). And I am guilty of making webpages decorated with squirming gifs, colored scroll bars, and cursors trailing glitter. Then again, it was the 90s and I was 15. Lucky for me somewhere along the line I aged, the 90s ended, and I fell in with some graphic designers who taught me about white space and simplicity. The challenge of designing websites and graphics that adhered to rules of usability focused and motivated me in a way that I still find to be surprising.

I was already aware of many of the amateur errors listed in Chapter 4 and sometimes choose to ignore them when I’m playing around, as the slap-dash (soon-to-be-redone) design of historiclove.com’s index page clearly demonstrates (see: justified text, a background image, questionable header design choices), but knowing the rules and being able to implement them are two different things. Web design and the execution of that design are very time consuming, difficult, and often frustrating things. Every time I sit down, no matter how simple the visual I have in my head, I find myself still tinkering hours later. But it’s so incredibly rewarding when you finally get it just right. For example, finding that perfect font.

Having read this book and also the design requirements built into our course’s syllabus, I’m excited to meld Golombisky and Hagen’s design guidelines with our assignments. I will be paying much more conscious attention to the way my design elements direct visual flow. I’m particularly interested in the idea of matching the design of our projects to the design aesthetic of the time period that our projects will focus on. I’m a true believer that subtle (or not-so-subtle) visual cues make an incredible difference in design experience, especially on web pages, which are active, interactive experiences, as opposed to passive ones. The course readings this week suggest useful ways for us to facilitate and guide our users’ experience of our sites. And thankfully programs such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver (which I am also excited to finally learn) make constructing such visual creations possible for people like me. Now I just have to figure out the content I’m going to be drawing about!

I have commented on Martha’s blog this week.

The fact that I am a cultural historian of the 20th century is beginning to make me feel a bit weird in comparing myself to my classmates, though I’m sure the gulf is nowhere near as great as it sometimes feels. Because I’m doing a combined masters/PhD, I don’t yet have a dissertation topic, so in more than one way I’m still trying to figure out the specifics of what I want to do. I do know that I feel incredibly compelled when I interact with mass media texts, particularly television, but my focus on 20th century history means I have an almost unbelievable scope of sources to choose from. Back as an undergrad, it was finding pictures of fallout shelters on the internet that hooked me into my chosen methodology and field of focus. It was picking apart images of radical feminists and reading television, film, and science fiction into my work that reinforced my decision. And it was the internet that facilitated my exploration – without it, my most important research project, a study of radical feminists, would never have happened. The internet seemed so integral a part of the process that at the time I didn’t even stop to think how it facilitated research that otherwise would have been impossible. I was lucky to have it so easily at my disposable.

I’m currently in the middle of a lecture sequence for my History 100 students, the first time I’ve ever had a chance to instruct, and I realized as I pondered the question above that researching and preparing my presentation took place almost exclusively online. The only exceptions were the books and articles I read in paper form, but, I still found all these resources online through databases and catalogs and searches on Amazon. My lectures focus on the domestic ideal in the 1950s, but really exploring the nuances of that decade from a cultural standpoint and demonstrating them to students would have been extremely difficult without new media. I’m showing them a bunch of clips from cartoons and t.v. shows, all of which I found on YouTube, and all of the advertising copy and other images and print material I’m using also came from online searches. Very few of them came from databases geared specifically to historians. In fact, many came from simple Google image searches (which may raise questions of credibility for some, but I didn’t find them too troubling when I evaluated my findings). The internet also put my in contact with past instructors who recommended relevant sources.

I even managed to work Beyonce into my lecture (which I am probably unhealthily proud of), and it was at that point in the slideshow that I could tell I’d won converts. These kids may not be “digitally born,” but they did grow up surrounded by new media, and have learned to speak its language to a certain degree. It was easier for them to hook into the new media components of my lectures, and connecting Beyonce to the ideal of a homemaker made what I was telling them immediately relevant to their current lives. It validated their experiences from a historical standpoint. I would have even found that image or thought of that approach without the happy accidents that often accompany Google keyword searches. By teaching them about subtext, I’m also instructing them on how to become more active participants in evaluating the new media they interact with every day.

To me new media seems to be an extension of what we already do. Digital history at this point seems most useful in making sources available to historians. It also provides useful tools. Showing this website to my students, which allows you to evaluate if you would survive an atomic attack, was another visual way for me to make all the graphic images I showed them of nuclear attacks seem relevant to their lives. And while scholars are still grappling with how to use the internet to disseminate analysis, it seems to me that sites like Wikipedia move in the right direction toward not only getting people excited about history, but creating a space for them to actually participate in what is in many cases a closed system.

So new media will change nothing, new media will change everything. New media is a tool for information sharing and information gathering. New media is a way to force the doors of the academy open, new media is a way to allow scholars to prove the academy’s usefulness. New media is a way to get a class full of college freshman to connect history to their everyday lives, new media puts historical sources in the hands of these same students, new media makes history real in a way that erases the disconnect between our audiences and the historical materials we deal with. New media allows a wider audience of people to see life in these distant, dusty things. New media, barring some apocalyptic meltdown, is most likely here to stay.

Well, my first live blogging experience was certainly interesting. I promised a summation of my thoughts following discussion, and to be honest at this point I’m a little brain dead, but I will do my best to offer some commentary.

More than once Sharon expressed some surprise that the consensus in the class seemed to tend toward an openness and acceptance in exploring new methods of scholarly credentialing, review, presentation, access, and dissemination. I’d like to offer my own personal opinion on why that might be, or at least why I feel open to exploring these new things. First though, I’ll try to hit on what might be some more general reasons.

David mentioned that many of our classmates are public historians, and therefore they may not feel as vested in participating in the traditional academic system, though Sharon did point out that public and academic historians continue to share integral scholarly relationships even after public historians “leave” the academy. Sheri pointed out that at Mason the department places its graduate students in a unique position by having us work through the CLIO digital history sequence. We are working in an environment that encourages exploring, learning about, and participating in new methods of scholarship. And it is not incidental that we are at this university – we all chose to apply here knowing about the digital history emphasis. I know I highlighted CHNM in my personal statement (and I’m sure everyone else at least mentioned it), and I do not plan on pursuing digital history as a minor field (I say now). I believe we were all predisposed to a curiosity about digital history, or a willingness to learn about it – if we weren’t, then we wouldn’t have applied to a school that requires that willingness.

But here is where I think the crux of the argument lies for me. Academia is changing. I chose to pursue a Ph.D. in history because I feel I’ve found my mental, emotional, and spiritual home in the collegiate institution. Academia allows me to read, write, and teach surrounded by a pre-assembled peer and student group, and provides me with resources I would be hard pressed to find otherwise. But when I sat down with professor after professor as an undergrad and told them I aspired to emulate them I was universally greeted with the words, “Don’t do it.” Don’t do it because you will never get a job, not because you’re not smart enough to get one, but because the jobs simply don’t exist. Don’t do it.

Then, of course, they proceeded to encourage me and guide me and make sure I ended up in a Ph.D. program. But their words have never left me and actually, we are all still hearing those words all. the. time. So when I hear discussions about tenure disappearing and how digital humanities are changing traditional scholarship I don’t feel resistant to it because from everything I understand the old system will not serve me. I think the emerging one, whatever it may look like, might. So I’m approaching it with an open mind. It’s a “what can it do for me” as opposed to a “what is it going to do to me” mentality. To me that seems a lot more useful.

Also, it’s not as if scholars and other participants aren’t aware of problems posed by new methods of scholarship, and it’s not as if people aren’t working (successfully) to fix them. I am now a part of that dialogue, and in that way, the future is even more in my own hands. Maybe my classmates feel the same, maybe not. But when you’re facing such difficult prospects, you have to be a pragmatist at the very least or why try at all? And in this case, I think that means viewing change as a tool for betterment and, perhaps paradoxically?, for control. And that is part of what makes me feel okay about deciding to “do it” after all.

Okay, class is over! Thanks for reading along.

9:49pm: “You probably don’t want to wear a t-shirt that says open access.”

9:37pm: “Before you can do interdisciplinary work you have to understand the disciplines.” – Sharon

9:25pm: Now discussing the ways to circumvent pay walls.

9:16pm: Open access is not only for content, it can be for software too. The idea with open source software is the same as open access content – the community will work together to make the content or program better.

9:06pm: Time to take a break! Stay tuned loyal reader(s?).

9:04pm: If peer review is open and you have to sign your name, you can’t blow it off. It may erase the incidents of flippant comments, and you won’t be allowed to trash someone else in your field without explaining your reasons.

8:56pm: Andi raises the question of how we will funnel scholarship and information on the internet (in the same way that presses and journals do now). Sharon says the scholarly societies need to step into those spaces, and wonders if the university presses will follow suit.

8:53pm: Megan notes that comments can become part of the object, just like notes in books that people leave behind. They are another layer of historical information (very close paraphrasing of her own eloquent words).

8:51pm: What is our work is out there any anyone can comment on it?

8:48pm: Open peer review allows you to respond directly to your reviewer.

8:44pm: If you’re going to argue with someone through an academic press, it’s going to take another three years for things to come to a point, says Sharon.

8:39pm: Sharon asks – where did we get the idea that we have to hide from each other when reviewing for each other? Megan asks if it has something to do with history’s tendency to attempt positioning itself as an objective science? Sheri suggests that it is a protective measure to allow junior scholars to freely critique junior scholars.

8:32pm: What happens to other parts of the apparatus, like the editors? What happens to our system? This may have to do with the difference between blind and public peer review. The standard argument is that when you have blind peer review you receive more honest feedback because ostensibly neither the writer or reviewer know each other, however, this is not necessarily true.

8:26pm: hackingtheacademy.org. A Creative Commons collection of quickly assembled essays. They argued that they could compile a decent essay collection compiled within only a week, though it took them much longer to edit than initially estimated. It is readily available, free, and can be printed at any time. Apparently a hard copy is in the works. This is an experiment in scholarly publishing. Was it peer reviewed?

Some argue that there was a comment and review period. It was not blind peer reviewed, but most edited collections aren’t anyway. So, there is the open access question. If it is available for free than the apparatus for peer review supported by the publisher crumbles. Where do we go next.

Sheri says one proffered solution was to have those wishing to be reviewed (their scholars) pay their peers to review them. The reason to do it is because it can be seen as a contribution to the community because it aids in the dissemination of the scholarship.

8:23pm: How do we expand the knowledge base in this environment? Open access is meant to address this problem by allowing easier dissemination of information.

8:21pm: Now discussing how the internet is regimenting the lives and education of K-12 students so that many undergraduates are uncomfortable with the more self-directed college environment.

8:13pm: Sharon points out that eventually everyone will have some methodological training in digital history. To what degree we include it in a scholarship and teaching will be varied. She believes it will have a greater impact on pedagogy than production for a long time, as it has been since the infiltration of the internet into academia. I think its role in production will largely increase in the field of research before it becomes prominent or noticeable in end product presentation (i.e. a digital dissertation).

8:12pm: I will add, as I chronicle the discussion I’m not being too thorough in checking for typos. If my meaning is obscured, please let me know!

8:11pm: Geoff points out that we still have to figure out what’s equal between the traditional system and the new, emerging system of academic production, credentialing, and recognition.

8:10pm: As we young scholars watch the traditional academic system, including tenure, break down, does this effect our willingness to explore new systems and technologies?

8:08pm: The system of scholarly credentialing is starting to break down. How do we feel about losing these traditional markers of excellence? What does a new system of credentialing looking like? How do we maintain academic integrity?

8:04pm: Is changing your name after marriage just as archaic an institution as copyright law? Apparently it does play into the way intellectual ideas and identities are disseminated. Sharon points out that we are gaining new online identities in the forms of screen names and domain names.

7:59pm: Willinsky discusses scholar ego at its relation to open access.

7:56pm: When signing a contract with a publisher, you can negotiate the terms of ownership.

7:53pm: Every time someone takes something on the internet it makes another copy. This is distribution/reproduction, not lending/sharing. Once it crosses this threshold, rights holders can come after us.

7:52pm: Creative Commons is a much more explicit way of determining rights than copyright.

7:46pm: As scholars, are job is to educate our audience, which means making our knowledge accessible. Jeri suggests Creative Commons is one way to mediate this dispute.

7:44pm: David points out that while copyright is moving toward more restrictions, technology is moving toward open accessibility. The conflicts we see emerge from the divergence of those two processes.

7:39pm: Lessig argues that up until this point culture has built upon culture. It was more homage, and now intellectual property laws are making this harder to do. Sharon points out the DJ Girl Talk.

7:37pm: Just realized WordPress greets me with the word “Howdy.” Not sure how I feel about this. Very distracting.

7:36pm: Megan – there’s a difference between people creating the content and people controlling the rights.

7:33pm: Megan points out that some entities or people try to extend copyright over things they have no right to claim copyright over, and will then try to charge people for their use. People will then pay for these sources without knowing any better (I tried to put it a little bit less cuss-wordy then Sharon). Fear, therefore, stifles creativity.

7:30pm: Megan says it may not be doomsday yet, but there are two problems with the issue of rights since the advent of the internet. She points out these are things we’ve been doing all along, but the internet makes these activities more visible, making it easier for commercial entities to sue them. She points out that people without intellectual or legal savvy or resources will therefore be disinclined to use sources to avoid legal action. This stifles scholarship and creativity.

7:27pm: Problems with Lessig – Scott raises the question, do you have to buy his doomsday scenario for American intellectual creativity?

7:26pm Initial consensus: the class seems open to the idea of open access.

7:12pm: Step 1) Plug in your laptops, ladies and gentlemen.

So. Somewhere in all the craziness that is the end of the semester I managed to do all the readings but forgot until the very last minute that I needed to do a blog post about them. As I drove to campus I pondered with some consternation as to whether or not I had time to produce a blog post, and decided that while I could probably come up with something, I had a better idea (at least I think it’s a better idea): I am going to live blog our discussion in class today. This will be my first time live blogging anything, so it will be a neat experiment. After class to is done I will produce a brief summation of the discussion including my own analysis of what we’ve discussed. I hope this is an acceptable endeavor.

In the D-Lib article on open access and open data, Elena Giglia writes “Access is the real challenge, as knowledge is usable only if it is accessible.” To me this seems to be the core arguments of all our readings. Each author then presents their own idea on how to meet this goal. Which solutions seem most satisfying? Where is the overlap and divergence between them? How do we, as young scholars, feel about open access? These are some questions I’m sure we’ll spend time on tonight.

As Scott noted in his blog entry, I am one of the presenters this week, and like him my blog post will reflect that, mostly because I want to save my own answers to some of the questions I/we plan to pose for class discussion. That said, I did once again find the readings this week to be both interesting and engaging. The choice of an article from Wired seemed especially apt for our crowd-sourcing theme, and our theme of exploring how academia and the web interact. It’s a nontraditional source that still provides an informative look at the history of crowd-sourcing. I found the discussion of VH1’s attempt to mine the internet for programing to be especially interesting, especially considering that this phenomenon continues to this day in the form of the show Tosh.0 on Comedy Central. I’ve only seen it one time and felt completely disinterested, mostly because I’d seen all the clips on the internet already and also because it provided me no means of interacting with it other than talking to the person on my right or maybe my dog is no one else was around.

Traditional media is not necessarily the best vehicle for this kind of digitally born and disseminated content, in part because television does not allow the viewer to interact with it in the same way the internet does – the viewer remains passive. On the website Reddit, which I know I name-check constantly, the content is exclusively user driven. Any user can submit any content (to an endless variety of user created subreddits), and the submissions are then ranked based on up votes or down votes, once again, all given by users of the site. The only qualification is that you must have an account with the site, however, all that’s needed to sign up in an email address. The most popular links, as determined by user vote, move up the list and eventually appear on the front page of their subreddit and/or the main page of the site, attracting an untold number of views along the way. Many, if not all, of the videos from Tosh.0 appeared first on Reddit, and the site is adept at both capturing and creating viral videos.

Reddit has been around since 2005, but it’s only been in the last few years that the website has exploded. One reason it’s so successful, I believe, is its focus on egalitarian participation. Further, when videos or other media go viral (or become memes), Reddit’s users more often than not take them and modify them, then redistribute the modified content through Reddit and other social media networks, which not only popularizes the originating content, but creates a genre of mimics and pastiche that often provide implicit or explicit commentary on the originating meme. Further, the comments section of the site allows registered users to discuss memes and other submissions, or to simply read these comments (even non-registered users can view the comments thread). This user-driven experience and allowance or even encouragement of user participation is what drives Reddit.

Another interesting feature of Reddit is the self-moderating nature of the site. Users are often in charge of moderating subreddits, and further, the upvote/downvote system is a reflection in many cases of Reddit users’ dedication to the scientific method, fact-finding, and fact-checking. When Reddit started, I remember it being dominated by political and science-driven content, but as its user base has exploded memes have come to dominate the front page. Users, however, are vigilant in policing each other, to the point that they have become fact checkers of all media they encounter and feel noteworthy. Reddit users have learned they have the power to interact with traditional media (most often news media) in order to affect the story and even circumvent traditional media channels to read out directly to the subjects of the stories. This interaction can take the form of lending aid or revealing falsehood or perceived wrongdoing, to the point where people feel loved and saved or harassed and victimized. Redditors can be ruthless in their missions to make an impact in real life. Reddit can even be the originator of media content – they have the power to make stars by uniting around a common cause or person and creating a noteworthy audience to the point that traditional media companies often recognize Reddit’s contribution.

So why did I present you with so much information about this site? Reddit is just one incredibly powerful example of what can happen when users are allowed to drive content. Just like any society they have created a community with rules and a mindset that has developed a mostly coherent idea of this community’s mission in the world. Reddit has garnered so much attention that traditional news media is beginning to acknowledge the community’s role in the world, and Anderson Cooper even felt the need to police Reddit by drawing attention to the controversial r/jailbait subreddit, since deleted as a result of his story which pointed out redditor’s often hypocritical behavior in terms of acting as moral police while ignoring their own sometimes doubtable practices. Reddit’s emphasis on free speech can become an escape from what society has deemed to be unacceptable, but sometimes the community forgets that their are reasons limits are placed on certain actions.

Because that can be the problem with these kinds of sites, as with any group. Its values and actions reflect those of its users. Reddit is demographically skewed as (young, white) male, with an emphasis on those from Western countries. Users also on average have at least some college education (Wikipedia). While this would perhaps explain Reddit’s above the board interest in science, politics, and rigorous fact checking, it also results in a website devoid of minority opinions. Reddit is a boy’s club, and when posts by or about women make the front page, it is often because the contents present them as sexual objects. Users who have objections to these depictions are often the subject of sometimes brutal criticism and then downvoted to oblivion. But this phenomenon is not unknown to us – it’s a reflection of the culture we’re raised in, another reason reddit is an interesting beast to participate in and study. Why minorities aren’t a larger presence on the site is an interesting point of investigation.

This brings me back to Roy Rosenzweig’s article about our role in policing websites such as Wikipedia. Both Reddit and Wikipedia have their own mechanisms for self-correction, but the in the case of Reddit especially, if the site’s user base is skewed and perhaps overtly or latently hostile to those who have different views, these sites then become (perhaps dangerously) limited in the kind of content they are willing to present. I believe that is perhaps part of why Roy put forward the idea that academics, instead of fighting Wikipedia, should instead begin attempting to contribute themselves. The question becomes then: how do we reach users who aren’t participating? The Smithsonian article shows that in many cases it’s best not to fight user-driven content but instead make use of existing technologies to disseminate material and messages to users who have already decided (as a group) what content distribution tools they’re willing to work with. But how to we create spaces for alternatives either within these communities or without? And further, how do we learn to let go of our material in an age when user participation is so largely driven by the user’s expectation that they will be allowed to interact actively with content, which may include modifying it? Also, most of these articles didn’t dwell too long on the importance of interface and useability in the enduring popularity of these websites, which strikes me as a noteworthy oversight.

I hope we’ll touch on some of these themes in our discussion today.

Disclaimer: I have not had a chance to use this weeks tool’s or view the websites yet, but I really enjoyed this week’s readings (ST:TNG reference much?) and I wanted to write about them before all the ideas I had melted out of my brain.

On February 25, 2010, I tweeted this tweet:

I was referencing The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (and Friday Night Lights, possibly the best show ever), which was one of those delightful books that completely blew my mind when I read it because it presented a way of seeing the world that I’d never thought of before. I pestered my co-workers for weeks with the concepts I’d learned from this book, and alas my poor Twitter followers suffered as well. Anyway, reading this week’s readings, this book immediately leapt to the forefront of my mind, and I was delighted to see Joanna Guldi namedrop it in her essay on history’s reconceptualization of space in relation to the emergence of nations and the nation-state (another favorite subject of mine).

What struck me most about all of these articles was how their authors argued that exploring spatial history and non-linear thinking is not a break from traditional scholarship but instead is part of an existent trend or tradition in academia. What’s new/unproven/unexplored/underdeveloped is the digital component. I think they have valid points – I found Alan Liu’s argument that linearity is an ideology to be presented in a particularly compelling manner – but I sensed that in emphasizing the continuity of spatial history and visualization, these authors all sought to establish a legitimacy for a field that is moving increasingly (and perhaps to some, threateningly) toward a digital medium.

The readings from the Scholarly Communications Institute seem to attempt to ease this transition by identifying problems and anxieties surrounding the digital medium and presenting solutions or means of seeking solutions. But often in these readings I felt there was a real separation between arguing for new ways of doing history using these improved or mutating techniques/digital mediums and demonstrating the ways in which they have been used. Maybe that’s a lack of close reading on my part, or maybe it’s symptomatic of where digital humanities as a field is as a whole. I am now going to go play with the tools and view the websites for the week, as I think that will help me solve the disconnect.

And I will close this blog post by returning to what I opened the post with: The Railway Journey. That book is an amazing exploration of how people construct space and time. It is an excellent example of how these types of investigations shape our field even (and especially?) when presented in a more traditional form/package. I think the authors of our readings this week were very wise to historicize their arguments. Being presented with examples of how these thought processes and methodologies have been applied to more traditional works and how temporal and spatial thinking have developed over time won me over because it proved a link or continuity to me between “the way it’s been done” and “the way it will be done.” Seeing that link helped me understand the usefulness and importance of the new technological tools that are now or will soon be at our disposal. In a way I’m sure all the authors we’ve read this semester tried to make the same case, but something about these readings for me proved especially effective.

Edit: After working with the tools and websites, I’ll reiterate that I find this weeks readings to be some of the most accessible. You asked how we would apply these tools to our work. In my own interests, I can see applying this kind of modelling to my previous studies of the advent of the age of the automobile and how it shaped the landscape and design of our country, from its role in the development of suburbs to the building of our interstate highways. Trying to relate this to my Grant Proposal Project, data could be modeled to show how ideas spread globally in order to build/flesh out different feminist movements.

So far I think this week’s readings have left me feeling more outside the circle than any other course readings so far – and whether or not that’s an apt spatial analogy according to Franco Moretti, I have no idea.

I read Graphs Maps Tress. I thought about it. I even think I agree with parts of it. For example, I think I was most plugged into the section with Maps. Graphs always feel like a loss to me, whether presented in typical or novel usage. I see numbers and something in my brain (or my psyche) just refuses to participate. But visually mapping concepts in a novel then comparing these maps to show change in literature over time was pretty impressive. Similarly, I appreciated the way Moretti used “genetic” or “evolutionary” trees to investigate how genre conventions are determined over time. Working in a used bookstore I got real up close and personal with the unbelievable horde of books that didn’t pass whatever test is set for success. After you finish crying because you have to alphabetize and shelve ten flats (roughly 400-500 mass market paperbacks) in 2 hours, you wonder what it is exactly that allows so few books to pass the test. What Moretti has done here is try to answer that question, and in doing so, tried to nail down successful genre conventions. It was interesting that Moretti chose the genre of mystery to put into a tree because it was one of the genres we were always most bloated with.

In my view, Moretti’s model doesn’t necessarily provide for explanations of those changes, but simply tracks and displays them. The afterward got into this a little bit, and I suppose this is where the historian comes in: our job is to contextualize and interpret the data. What Moretti is doing is extracting it and presenting it in such a way that makes it easier find, read, and study.

As I write this evaluation of Moretti’s book I’m trying to decide how it can be tied to our other course readings and class discussions as a whole. For this week, the other readings discuss the creation of tools that can aggregate and display day in ways useful to historians, as Moretti has done. Graphs, Maps, and Trees are all tools (that he proposes), and similarly Dan or Google are working on ways to collect, mine, and display existing data in a way that makes it more accessible to researchers.

My question then becomes: what are the limitations of these presentations? The authors of our readings themselves struggle with this question. Dan Cohen breaks down the pros and cons of the Google N-Gram Viewer. I think he suggests that this tool is struggling with quantity vs. quality – it is a great way to find frequency of terms but it doesn’t contextualize them for us. When I was browsing the tools and sites for this week I was dismayed by how difficult it was to figure out how to use some of the tools (thought in many cases that might be more of a reflection on me). Toolmakers then also struggle with useability, and in this brave new world of digital humanities, user knowledge probably hasn’t caught up yet to the level of digital literacy necessary to operate a useable tool.

So our goal as researchers and explorers as we use these new tools is always to remember the limitations of the forms the tools come to us in, and the way they choose to present data. Because this presentation will shape our research and conclusions just as much as the data.

I will start my discussion of today’s readings by saying I wish they had come a bit earlier in the course sequence so that they’d fallen before we handed in our proposals. I felt there was a lot to be learned here about why digital humanities are important, and how scholars address each other when discussing this issue. I found the ACLS reading to be especially pertinent to many of our class discussions, but especially to the proposal because to me it read like one giant pitch for “cyberinfrastucture” or the importance of the new digital age/knowledge economy to humanities. It was a good a lesson in how to write such a paper, even if it did not necessarily have as focused a purpose as our proposals did. But it gave me a better idea of the language and structure that scholars use when making such a “pitch,” as it were. The article also addressed issues very relevant to my own project when it went over in fairly thorough detail the difficulties that copyright laws present when trying to build digital history projects. Because I’m building an archive that will gather resources generated in or around the 1960s and 70s, I am likely to run into copyright issues, and this article answered questions for me in a way that may allow me to be a bit more articulate about my plan in the future. The article also discussed how important building a community is for all digital humanities projects, and the repetitive manner in which the authors emphasized this point really drove it home to me in a way previous readings hadn’t quite managed.

Similarly, the report and white paper on how digital and public history is treated within academia in terms of employment and tenure revealed just how these new trends toward collaboration are redefining not only the way we do history, but are forcing us to re-think how we institutionalize it. I couldn’t help but feel, as I read through these three articles, that I was the intended audience of each of them. I say that because I am constantly being urged or forced to rethink my own conceptions of history and academic history, and I have only just barely begun to pursue it as a career.

As to the article on writing a digital history article, I was fascinated to read about the difference between writing an article specifically for a digital medium versus simply digitizing a traditional article. Most interesting was the fact that the authors had to find a balance between integrating the functions and structure of a traditional article with the new structural possibilities of a digital medium in order to make their project palatable to their peer review audience. I would have liked to have read more about how the article is being used, and perhaps even some direct feedback from those using it out in the field as a way to further evaluate the effectiveness of their project, and to investigate how far the actual use of their article might have deviated from its intended purpose or audience.