I recently discussed one approach to an open platform for the preservation of local history at Barcamp Boston 5– slides here: www.readwritehistory.com/2010/04/19/the-future-of-history/–and am interested in connecting with Eli and others who share this same interest.

Lee Wright

Which is just to say that I’d be very interested in contributing to a document of the sort you describe.

Will

In many ways, the web aspect of Columbus Neighborhoods will follow that path. We’ll build the space, and we’re looking for input.

Its great to know that you are trying out Dimdim. Do share your experience and/or questions that you might have.

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Citylore “curates” place based features from their own fieldwork and partners as well. The whole is polished and heavily produced but also accessible for both the casual visitor and, apparently, the contributor. The project features consolidation–bringing lots of disparate people and stories together in one place but it also has the potential to feature contributions from many partners. I’m curious how, and to what extent, we can produce something similar using opensource tools rather than a one off digital production. And how that production can have the quality of inviting social network gathering places. We are close to the point where enhanced cell phones will call up place based stories like these from the Web. But as much as you can access information in fragments by location, I’m curious how you can make the information accessible both by location and make the site a place to share, interact, enjoy, learn.

Though larger museums are great at promoting anniversaries, exhibitions, and strategic material releases, smaller projects seem to update intermittenly. I am not sure I know enough about smaller museums and archives, but it seems like exhibition strategies play a large part in attracting people to the physical space. I image most of those visitors will not return to research in the permanent collections. A digital permanent collection is easier to access when someone is attracted by an exhibit, and of course easier to comment on and add to.

I have never been a fan of history weeks or months. I would like everyday to be history day, but I think for getting people interested in place, lor objects, dates can be of particular use. I wouldn’t want to further consolidate the limits that time-periods put on understanding places. Could my old home town of Richmond ever be thought of as a post-war town given the abundance Civil War statues and markers all? Still, in some of my more utopian moments, I image a Digital Humanities pledge week, where all of the social media and google news links lead everyone who searches historical places, or times, subscribe to blogs, etc., to a mammoth network, where national and local content can reinforce each other. Did I just make an argument for media consolidation? This needs more work, but thatcamp time is running out. Looking forward to talking about this.

It sounds like our ideas have similar veins of participation. On a first read, I wonder whether the outreach for adding to the website is all virtual. That is, would going to particular communities in person, particularly to folks there with interests in local history, serve as a way to get more people involved? Especially folks who may not be seasoned in submitting information online. That leverage is just one of many possibilities, but I thought about it right away. Look forward to hearing more about the project!

Equating digital literacy with fearlessness comes from some first hand experience with software training and observing my own interaction with computers/software over the years. From my personal end, I’ve observed my own literacy is limited not particularly by any tools I was educated in or not, but by what I’ve had time to get into to meet a particular curiosity or need. I have a general sense that I could do anything, programming and application-wise, if I had the gumption and time.

In training others on a particular piece of software we use for indexing oral histories, we have observed that technical/computer skill sets of, say, a room full of high school teachers varies significantly. But that variability does not depend on age–though there is generally a correlation–and hence our strategy for teaching them has to be adaptable. I’ve observed that the variability falls on a continuum that I generally characterize as computer/tech fearlessness. On one end of the scale you have the fearless, to whom you can explain the broadest concepts and goals and turn them loose to bang their head against the software (i.e., little need for examples and details). On the other end, you have the more fearful, for whom step by step examples and instructions are imperative. The challenge is that the extremities often have to be instructed during the same short period of time. So I’m thinking the answer to the question “How can you teach advanced and basic literacy to a group simultaneously?” lies somewhere in the question “How do you teach/promote technology fearlessness?” Of course, we have to characterize it better first probably…

To quote Engels, as he laments learning from documents and records alone: “I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your every-day life, to chat with you on your condition and your grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I forsook the company and the dinner parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so.”

Well, that was 1845, England. Looking back, it is arguable exactly how many dinner parties Engels excused himself from, but the point is that, in 2009, we find ourselves in a different sort of revolution. Yet the questions we ask and the answers we seek (both as citizens and as scholars) remain essentially the same through the ages, methinks. I guess I don’t have to convince the choir that this kind of community-based work is important, or what may be gleaned by it.

Since working with Dennie, I have had occasion to consult with multiple organizations (from a group of community gardeners to a local government) that are interested in using digital media to tell the stories of their communities, to document their struggles and their successes, and to enhance their ability to stimulate dialogue and affect change.

The problems I have encountered are significant: a lack of shared terminology regarding digital tools and content management systems, misconceptions of legalities, liabilities, funding, and the time required to generate content and engage dialogue. And building collaboration between organizations becomes more complicated under these circumstances.

In my own work, which I attempted to carry forward as a personal project after graduation, I have encountered other sorts of issues: questions of ethics, concerns about images of people and representation in the digital age, and legal questions. And then there’s the need to consider a succession plan for the content generated, which really leads back to the first set of issues: If local community organizations can be imagined to be decent repositories for local community projects, don’t we need to share a vocabulary, at the very least?

Before I suggest we create a #thatcamp nation document to shore up all these basics (not sure Engles would approve), let me just say I’m looking forward to hearing the classes you teach, and seeing your student’s work. Here’s to keeping our feet on the ground in the effort to document and understand people, place, and community.

I think the idea of creating “a collaborative open source training environment” sounds wonderful. We were trying to do something like that involving Miami students by launching the CHATLab:

www.muohio.edu/chat

I noticed that some small liberal arts colleges are banding together to share resources, and we should think about doing so as well, even at bigger universities.

I look forward to seeing you again.

This is a great panel proposal.

Also, I have used both wordle and juXta on the text of Frankenstein as a way of combining close reading with distant reading.

I put up a panel about my poetry visualizations, but maybe we could combine?

Best, Laura

Still, I would also like to talk about an expanded idea of digital storytelling. Like Faith Van Horne suggests, a blog could be considered digital storytelling. It seems most people construct ‘digital stories’ as part of an assignment that teaches them to use audio and video as primary source material or as a way to rather quickly present an historical argument with multi-media.

To tell the truth I don’t see much difference between the methodology of digital storytelling and historical documentaries produced for television broadcast. The former, having the advantage of being more easily produced and distributed, are surely at a huge disadvantage in terms of attracting audiences. Historical documentaries use interviews, archival footage and narrative voice-over to make arguments. This seems also to be the major thrust of digital storytelling. The argument does seem to be of more importance in digital storytelling, or at least seems less obscured than the historical documentary’s often inevitable seeming conclusion. However, digital storytelling inherits many of the problems of the historical documentary, particularly in terms of narrative authority, causation, and the use of experience as evidence.

By this I mean that the voice-over commands an authority to interpret events, and unlike his written counterpart, the history writer, calls more often upon anecdote, affect, and experience. Furthermore, he/she is not held to the standards of footnoting. Also, like its linear counterpart, writing, the choice of evidence and its arrangement in documentary often suggests a causation that may be questionable or presentist. Also, the Center for Digital Storytelling encourages participator production methods, surely an unsettling issue for academics who prize critical distance in analysis. In short, the digital documentary seems to take advantage of online materials and the ease which software allows them to be arranged and interpreted, but doesn’t offer much in the way of new interpretation methods.

I myself recall the time-consuming matter of driving to archives, setting up an easel, and videotaping documents, then copying the video footage to the tape on which my interview or voiceover audio was recorded. Digital storytelling is faster, no doubt, but those setting the rules seem to downplay some of the other advantages of the digital. Those that allow evidence to be annotated, linked or footnoted instead of buried in the credits. Those that might question voice-overs as authority, break down narrative structures, present fuller and more varied patterns of causation, or even deny causation altogether. Of course, that has been a goal of many pre-digital storytellers, in print, radio and television. So, again the digital would just make this faster and easier. Ideally I would like to talk about how to move past this. I’m not sure how to start thinking about it, but I’m pretty sure it’s time to stop making the rules and start breaking them.

On a related note, if you all haven’t seen this Ariadne article by Chris Rusbridge (“Excuse Me… Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?”), it’s worth a read: www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/. It’s a few years old, but the points he raises about common assumptions re digital preservation are still spot-on, and are extremely relevant to our discussion. Small projects (and even big ones!) tend to be frightened away from digital preservation because the goal – to preserve everything perfectly, forever – seems so out of reach. We believe there are steps that can be taken to sustain projects that will have a big impact, even without reaching some ‘perfect’ state of preservation.

Jim, it’d be great to walk away with something concrete that acted a sort of action plan. The conceptual problem, though, is that it takes years to get any real plan moving in a university setting. The kinds of literacies that we’re interested in here, though, are such that they are constantly changing. Ten years ago it would have been a no-brainer that knowledge of HTML tags would be a must-have, but it’s not clear whether that’s true anymore. (Certainly you don’t have to know assembly code these days, which would have been an absolute necessity for the digital literacy of 30 years ago.) So any list of goals that we create might have to be dual-layered: one layer containing the specific literacies that we want students to develop, and another containing the reasoning that led to the first layer. That way, when technology changes in such a way that the first-order skills are different, or are ranked differently in terms of importance, we’ll have a consistent methodology for rethinking the goals.

One complication I’d like to throw into the mix is this. As web use becomes more and more social as the years go by, the value of a given digital artifact becomes more and more difficult to locate in a single space. If I post a DH project on my blog, for instance, certainly I’ll want to preserve what I post there. But much of the value of what I post comes from the comments that are posted on the blog (which are easy enough to archive), as well as the commentary that comes from other blog posts in my network, discussions on Twitter, and so forth. Is there a meaningful way to take a snapshot of the network that gives my blog post meaning? (Moreover, since the longitudinal development of the network around a project is of great importance, is there a way to archive the development of the network as a series of snapshots or as an entire timeline?)

Really looking forward to discussing the issue with you.

On a related note, questions of artistic success and merit seem almost allegorical for the academic enterprise in general. What constitutes academic success is not necessarily an internal feature of the academic work itself, but is instead a complex relation between the work and the “academic world”. I wonder if the world of studio art just happens to be a bit further down the road toward accepting the broader digital world as part of the artmaking process than the academic world is to accepting a broad academia-making process. Thus maybe there’s something that 21st-century academics can learn from 21-century studio artists’ attempts to redefine and reshape success in their field.

RE: The kind of analysis I’m doing with Zotero. I’m using qualitative methods to do an interpretive study of my topic in distance education. So I’m using Zotero to create thematic categories from transcripts of interviews, emails, and some conversations in meetings. This is a technique widely used in qualitative research in the humanities and social sciences.

I also enter notes on all my readings related to the above. It comes together to create what I think is a pretty powerful database around my research topic.

Hope this is helpful.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I would think (this is all hypothetical as I haven’t yet worked in the field) that you are correct about the flood of information that could come in when we open the gates, but I would think that is manageable. The bigger issue in my mind is participation; in the cities where we work, not everyone has his/her own cell phone, or internet access at home, so the real challenge is to get as many folks as possible contributing like the Gov 2.0 article.

I am not familiar with any such information needs profile for planners, but I’ll ask around! And I’m going to check out the CWRU Second Life lead; thanks for pointing it out.

Having a background in Library and Information Science, I now wonder if anyone has done an information needs profile on urban planners (or similarly positioned professionals)? How do they communicate and gather information? Speaking of libraries, I believe the Kelvin Smith Library at CWRU is very active in Second Life, going so far as recreating the entire campus in SL (or, so I’m told). I don’t have any SL experience but I wonder if “visiting” their campus to see how they (do or do not) present new buildings and construction/renovation projects might be revealing?

Anyway, just a bunch of thoughts that came to mind. Hope I can catch your session!

I’ll be looking forward to hearing more about the technology, processing, formats, etc. Any chance you can hook us a up with a guest pass to experiment with/tour the OHMS web tool?

Definitely an interesting question, especially in light of something like Judith Butler’s take on Performance Theory. While we can debate the accuracy of Butler’s work, it is definitely easy to see how “performing” gender roles in something like SL could be an ideal place to teach such theories.

We’ve also been using Omeka with various groups, including middle and secondary teachers in our TAH workshops, and undergrad and graduate students in the History Dept. (see: csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits). I like the fact that your students are not just collecting and exhibiting existing artifacts but also engaging in original content creation such as the multimedia slideshows. Looking forward to hearing more about your approach and experience.

Next I will explore how these program may tie into PastPerfect, our collections software. I’ve also started dreaming up ideas for an upcoming spring break camp and possibly teaching the kids how to upload content and create mini-web exhibits.

I have been experimenting with the tiling of large georeferenced images so that only the sections being viewed need to be downloaded. Again Google Earth allows the most options for display of layers, but it is not often installed on public computers. I have not taken the time to learn a lot about the mashup options for Google Maps and Bing, but my initial experience has been that they are more complicated and not as full featured. I look forward to hearing others experiences.

My philosphy is to always maintain the original tiff scans, so that I can always reformat any images for newer technology.

I have used filemaker as an internal database for many purposes. I usually export the data for use on the web though. You might look into the Ohio’s Heritage Northeast portal (www.ohiosheritagenortheast.org/) on CSU’s contentDM site. They provide free access to Historical Societies in the area. I have a filemaker database already set up to create exports for ContentDM that even include georeferenced links to Google Maps and Bing (as long as you have an address or coordinates for the picture). You would have to add some additional metadata to fit contentDM standards, but the work you already have done could be exported easily.

I recently read somewhere about the DjVu plug-in and it’s marketing/branding strategy. The message was that they do not really have one, which ultimately hurts sites that use DjVu. Unlike, say, Adobe Acrobat or Flash, you cannot count on users having it installed (this is also true for Adobe plug-ins, though to a lesser extent I imagine). Have you had this problem at all with Rails & Trails? Or do you see any barriers to using Google Earth as a vehicle for GeoReferenced maps? Are you aware of any web/browser standards (current or in development) that apply to this kind of work? Does openstreetmap.org have any use here or is Google/Yahoo/MS really that much more developed? I tend to embrace open source alternatives whenever I can, but with mapping, I’m not that knowledgeable, so I’m not sure what’s out there. In any case, I find your site to be extremely useful and know that faculty/staff here at CSU often recommend it to students for research, so I’ll be curious to hear more.