readings discussion

Wikipedia- Talk pages

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The reading assignment for class on Thursday is to read “The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory and Wikipedia” by Robert Wolff. In the first paragraph Wolff discusses the advantages that the digital revolution has offered to us: easier access to published scholarship and to different primary sources. With the use of card catalogs and the use of word processing software, both have facilitated research and writing, enhancing scholarly productivity. Though a great new tool to share history through the digital space, some historian are shying away as a legitimate source of information acquisition. Wolff explains that the reasoning why professional historians may be so hesitant with the digital world is because before the rapid growth of the Internet as it is today, most academic scholarship had found homes in libraries and on electronic subscriptions pay walls. With the expansion of the Internet, historians are not the only ones who can critique each other’s work. As the Internet continues to revolve within moments, anyone can pull up any historical event that comes to mind. Wolff gives the example of searching Documenting the American South, to searching the web for the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. Wolff says this extreme growth of wanting more history knowledge doesn’t just come from professional historians, yet its now coming from the general public. With the Internet evolving and through general use of the website know as Wikipedia people have the power to edit entries within its website.

Due to this growth and access to the Internet, it has given them the power to write history on web though they don’t have the full knowledge of what history is compared to a trained and educated historian. Wikipedia for example, this website provides historical information available to and sometimes written by the general public. One of the reason why Wikipedia has now become a norm to looking up information is in conducting a search it is usually the first site to appear in the search criteria. Wikipedia is the first website to pop on the screen rather than an .edu or .net website (a more scholarly or academically scrutinized establishment). Wolff poses the question as to “Why exploring writing history through Wikipedia?” his simple answer is that it allows the reader to deconstruction the different stages of how some entries can be changed over time. Wikipedia has become a community of writers, given them a chance to write history.

Wikipedia has a “Talk” page that allows its audience to discuss historical info that they believe is incorrect. In order to get truly involved in the discussion you must had other information to back you claim but

Wolff uses an example of of two user 172 and user H2O arguing online about how the American Civil War, why it really started. One would edit the page to what they believed caused the Civil War. User H20 would delete what the user 172 claimed to be the cause of the war and then write what he thought was the reason. With no question the digital revolution is rapidly expanding and with that false information can be spread just as fast. This could be prevented if historian work come aboard the digital revolution train and make sure that we don’t have this recurring theme on Wikipedia of people trying to fact each other and giving false information to million of people that look at this site everyday.

 

Dicussion Question:

  • It is good or bad that Wikipedia has the Talk part of there website?
  • As Internet continues to grow when will be able to trust information that is been given to us.
  • Have you ever seen a big mistake on Wikipedia and have you done anything about it?

Credit Where Credit is Due- Digital History and Citations

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We had three pretty short readings for Tuesday- Sarah Werner’s “It’s History, Not a Viral Feed,” Melissa Terras’ “Digitisation’s Most Wanted,” and W. Caleb McDaniel’s “Slave Sales on Twitter.” (In addition, of course, we were linked to the bot Twitter account that McDaniel created.)

Werner uses her blog post to discuss the many (many, many) ways in which history-based social media accounts often (sometimes purposely) fall short of meeting the minimums set forth by their more formal counterparts. Particularly, she focuses on Twitter accounts that post historically vague photos, along with captions that have the potential of being true, but often aren’t (and even if they were, the teenagers who run the account never cite their sources). Of course, this speaks not to just social media cites (ha ha, get it?), but to our work as undergraduates. During syllabus week, for every semester of the rest of your educational lives, each one of your professors will take the time to read to you the university’s plagiarism policy. They don’t do it because they like it, nor because they expect any of you to actually be listening to it after the first one or two times. They do it because they have, otherwise they run the risk of also being held accountable when, inevitably, some undergrad student thinks that they can get away with submitting a thesis statement that is plagiarized.

Terras has a more lighthearted and oddly interesting post. She explores which digitalized items are the most accessed at several libraries throughout the U.K., and offers explanations and guesses as to what makes these items so appealing to the general public- and how accessibility is an important aspect for any library that wishes to appeal to the public. Terras suggests that these items are most popular because they are the most hyped about in their respective communities (i.e., 17th century digitized lute sheet music is accessed the most by musical students), and because they are properly cited and attributed- allowing these communities ti easily find and access them. She also discusses the importance of setting good examples, as it were- historically-based Twitter accounts have the ability and the responsibility to properly cite and source their tweets. By doing so, they not only allow their followers to follow-up on their own research, but they show these followers the importance of a good citation.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was most interested in our last reading. I think McDaniel’s bot account is the most important thing that we’ve looked at thus far in the semester (of course, we’re not even two weeks in yet, so there’s plenty of room for changing that answer). Of course, the content of the account itself is beyond comprehension. But the way that McDaniel has taken this little piece of historical fact and turned it into something that can be witnessed in real time in 2016 is amazing. It’s easy enough for any scholar to say that a slave was sold in the United States between 1820 and 1860 in the United States alone. But to take this information and present it so that it’s seen as an on-going issue instead of a fact of the past is another matter. Roy Rosenzweig is cited in the post as saying that historians and professors are starting to care about social media ““because our students do… if historians believe that what is available free on the Web is low quality, then we have a responsibility to make better information sources available online.” This is a huge shift forward, and shows that we, as current students, are fortunate (or unfortunate, as it were) to be studying at a time when professors are not only telling us that Wikipedia is an unacceptable source, but giving us the resources to find acceptable and scholarly sources as substitutions.
Of course, we also ought to look at the content itself of McDaniel’s post. As McDaniel himself writes, the sheer volume of tweets automated a day by this account “shifts attention from those metrics to the raw number of tweets it emits, a number that will increase rapidly and serve, I hope, as an arresting reminder of slavery’s magnitude.” The metrics he speaks of are the usual indicators of a successful Twitter account- favourites, followers, and numbers of retweets. Instead, the bot’s focus is the unbelievable number of tweets that it puts out a day. One tweet is automated every 3.6 minutes, which is roughly 16 tweets per hour, for 24 hours a day- which is 400 tweets a day. Not even Kanye throwing shade at Wiz generated that many tweets. Which brings up McDaniel’s next set of questions- questions that he had for himself, and questions that he suspects the bot’s followers might have. “Should I follow a feed about slave sales? Am I annoyed that these reminders come so often? What would it mean not to follow or, once having followed, to unfollow or mute the tweets? Do those deliberate or implicit acts of silencing resemble, in microcosm, our nation’s larger inability to come to terms with slavery’s history despite evidence of its continued relevance all around us?” I’m not going to lie, these exact questions went through my mind after I opened the twitter page. How terrible of a person am I exactly if I don’t follow the account because I don’t want my feed cluttered with these tweets every 3 minutes? Am I even more terrible if I follow this account just so that my followers can see how good of a person I am- and then mute it so I don’t actually have to see all these posts? The fact that we even have these options is a whole other discussion.

 

 

Discussion questions to consider:

1. Of course, please consider the questions which McDaniel poses.

2. Is it good or bad that we are able to have accounts such as On This Day in History? Does this dilute the seriousness of history or make it more accessible and comprehensible?

3. I encourage you all to click through (however briefly) the many wonderful collections that the New York State Museum has available to its patrons. Which collections do you think is the most accessed, or better yet, which item? I hope to have an actual answer to this by class on Tuesday.

Opening Our Eyes to a New Online Accessible World

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Three readings and one video were to be read today, I’m here to discuss them all so that as a class we can better understand what’s going on. Starting with the video, “Is Google Knowledge”, that can be located at Youtube, Hank Green goes on a tirade about whether or not Google is considered “knowledge”. The argument is if we as individuals use Google as a search engine to get information does the process of us having to do this count still as still having gained knowledge. Basically are we cheating ourselves by googling anything we wonder about. Does it make us stupid and/or lazy by having this information at our fingertips?

In comparison Professor Melissa Terras’ piece, Reuse of Digitised Content, discusses the multiple changes she’d like to see in regard with creative reuse of digitised cultural heritage content. A bit of backstory on the content she’s referring to, it is in reference to works such as paintings, sculptures, photographs, etc that galleries, libraries, archives and museums are making public online for individuals such as you and I to access. Terra herself applauds this action on the basis that this access has allowed individuals to create pretty neat things with the works they are seeing such as fabrics, corsets and notebook covers to name a few things. The issue she sees with this unlimited access though is that there are poor search engines, too few works with copyrights, not enough information on how to get copyrights and poor image quality.

The next reading after, by, Dr. Ernesto Priego called, “Some Tips for WordPress.com Beginners”, discusses a multitude of definitions that one should know if interested in blogging (or interested in being relevant with youth today). In addition, Priego uses the published blog of Ryan Cordell to give helpful tips on how one could have a successful blog/ blog post if interested. Examples of this come from all the information that was gathered by him in regards to having a catchy byline/authorship, permalink, Bio/About Me page and categories.

The last reading titled,“Putting big Data to Good Use”, by authors S. Graham, I. Milligan and S. Weingart, examines the positive outcomes that occur when published works get transferred and become accessible online. The example the authors use is the Old Bailey, which covers over 197,000 trials in Britain. The scholars that were tasked with this not only brought Old Bailey online but assisted in creating formats that would help anyone who was looking over it to be able to research specific cases easier by having for example, key words and suggested trails. Authors Graham, milligram and Weingart also discuss the lack of historians being apart of this digitizing process. Though few have slowly made strides to become more involved there is still a scarcity of methods being taught in regards to how to accomplish such as feat as digitizing old works in the historian field itself.

From the three readings that were mentioned connections can be made between them. The first connection that I saw was that all three were written in a type of blog format. There were even instances in which an author would ramble on and catch themselves in the act. They’d let a reader know that whatever was said may have been a rant with no coherent meaning. In regards to content itself all the readings discuss the manner in which accessibility to the online world whether it be through the reuse of digitized content, an online blog or the transferring of online data, has been helpful. Helpful in manners that they themselves did not see possible up until the point they began to appreciate it through the research of a topic of interest to themselves. Being able to have access to the internet is key to one expanding their knowledge and these readings are proof of the wonders that the internet holds. What could have possibly not been imagined decades ago it seems as though online accessibility has reached the farthest corners and will continue to do so.

 

QUESTIONS TO BE POSED:

Is there anything you know of that you have not been able to find accessible online and would like to see accessible?

Do you feel as though as students we have not taken as much advantage as we should be being able to have access online through most all of our smart devices? And why?

Having gained knowledge about certain topics we may or may not have known about before, how do you see yourself spreading awareness about them? Or do you think these authors wrote what they wrote with no real intent on widening the consciousness about the reuse of digitized content, online blogging or the transferring of online data?

Post Guidelines

Maeve Kane

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To post on your assigned day, you must be logged in to the course site; posting options are available on the far left of the dashboard space under “Add New.”  The posting schedule is available as a PDF on Blackboard.  You may also start a post and save it as a draft to finish later without publishing; you are the only one who can edit your posts.  You don’t need to include your name or “by XYZ” in the text of your post, as your username will appear under the title once it’s published.

Posts should be about 500-800 words long (longer is ok too) and must be posted by noon the day before the assigned class meeting. Posts must be in complete sentences and you will be graded on correct punctuation and grammar.  There is a word count tally at the bottom of the post box if you’re unsure about length.  Your post should synthesize for the class the major points of the assigned readings and assume that the audience (your classmates) have already read the assigned readings.  On days that we have how to readings assigned, summarize the purpose of the tools.  Be sure to think about your post as a very small essay; it should have an introduction, conclusion and paragraph breaks to indicate topic shifts as well as transition language between points so that your change of topic is clear to the reader.

The assigned readings should be linked in the text as you discuss them with “pretty links.”  Merely dropping in a url address like this: http://ahis290.maevekane.net/ instead of making a pretty link like this will lose one point.  To make a pretty link, type the text you wish to link, highlight it with your cursor, and click the little link icon in the formatting options bar.

Posts must include three discussion questions about the assigned readings and have a title–try to choose a title that is descriptive and ties together the thematic points of your summary.  Posts should also be set to the “readings discussion” category so that the course site stays easy to navigate as we add more things to it throughout the semester.  You must also add at least three tags (think of this as the metadata for your post).  What are your readings about?  Are your questions about the technical aspects or the thematic aspects (ie, wordpress vs. economic history).

For your discussion questions, do NOT pose yes/no questions.  Think big with how and why questions–why did a historic event happen, how does displaying information in certain ways affect the viewer’s understanding of it, why would someone use a tool, how is the tool limited, etc.  You’re also welcome to post clarification questions–how does a tool work, how do I make it do X?  Think about the discussion questions as a way of guiding what you want to talk about and cover in class that day.

You may, but you are not required to, include images in your posts.  You can do this with the “Add Media” button on the upper left, which will let you upload an image from your computer and then position it in the text.

When finished, hit the blue Publish button on the top right.  If you’re not finished, you can hit the “Save Draft” button above publish, in which case your saved post will appear in the list of “All Posts” on the far left of the dashboard when you want to come back to it.

You may compose the text of your post in an offline writing program, but be aware that software like Word sometimes includes strange formatting when you copy and paste in the post field.  To avoid this, right click in the post field and select “Paste and Match Style.”

Posts will be graded on a 10 point scale based on your organization, grammar, links to readings, synthesis of the readings, and mechanics like pretty links, tags, categories and questions.