Monthly Archives: March 2010

Digital Humanities at NCPH

The digital humanities are well represented this week at the National Council for Public History annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. By my count, fully nine of the approximately ninety sessions, workshops, working groups, and posters are either entirely or partially dedicated to the web and other digital outlets for public history. This equals the nine digital history sessions on the program at the much (many times) larger American Historical Association in January.

Here’s the list with times and titles. Please consult the full program online [.pdf] for room numbers and participants (and please contact me if I left anyone out!)

Thursday March 11, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Jump Start Your Digital Project in Public History

Thursday, March 11, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Digital Curricula in Public History

Thursday, March 11, 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
History 2.0: Engaging the Public in History through the World Wide Web

Friday March 12, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Issues in Historic Preservation (including Cara Kaser on “Using Digital Tools in Historic Resource Surveys: The Oregon Survey Program”)

Saturday, March 13, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Publish, Share, Collaborate, and Crowdsource Collections: Zotero 2.0 For Public Historians

Saturday, March 13, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Community of Records in the Age of New Media: Family History as Public History

Saturday, March 13, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Poster – The Flushing Local History Project: A Digital Community Art Project and Archive

Saturday, March 13, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Poster – Yesteryear: Historical Blogs as Educational Tools

Saturday, March 13, 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Omeka: An Open Source Tool for Publishing Cultural Heritage Online

Briefly Noted for March 4, 2010

Facebook, Google, Apple: Patents Gone Wild — The last ten days or so have seen a flurry of suspect behavior by large technology companies, their intellectual property lawyers, and the United States Patent Office. First, Facebook secured a patent for “dynamically providing a news feed,” which has likely caused some consternation among the folks at Twitter and Google Buzz. Then, Google secured its own patent for “using location information in an ad system” spelling trouble for Microsoft’s Bing, Facebook, and any other company looking to push ads to users of their services based on location information sent from mobile devices. This includes Apple, which recently acquired a company called Quattro Wireless, apparently in hopes of using its technology to deliver location-based ads to iPhone users. Finally, Apple got into the patent game itself, filing a patent-violation suit against HTC, maker of Google’s Nexus One smartphone, accusing the company of infringing more than twenty iPhone patents. This is getting ugly.

Briefly Noted for March 2, 2010

YouTube dropping IE6 support — At more than a week old, I suppose this doesn’t qualify as breaking news, but it’s still big news. According to Ars Technica, YouTube will cease to support Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 beginning March 13, 2010—that’s right, less than two weeks from today. To the delight of CHNM’s web developers, many schools, libraries, and cultural institutions have already started to transition away from IE6, though not as quickly as any of us would like. The decision to stop supporting the nearly decade old browser by one of students’ favorite websites will hopefully serve a further forcing function.

Like “Pin Tab” in Chrome? Try “App Tabs” for Firefox — One of my favorite things about Google Chrome is the “pin tab” feature, which allows users to keep frequently used web pages and applications “pinned” at the top left of the tabs toolbar. Now the App Tabs extension brings this same functionality to Firefox. Unfortunately, the extension doesn’t work with very many themes, so if you give it a try you may also want to download Strata40, which seems to handle it well. Both add-ons have been written in anticipation of Firefox 4.0, which is due at the end of this year and will include features and design elements of each.