Category Archives: Briefly Noted

Briefly Noted for October 14, 2008

Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb continues his must-read series on design process for digital humanities with some notes (and code) for Front End Development.

Again on front ends and again via Clioweb, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has unveiled a new “dashboard” user interface, a numerical, widgetized overview of how IMA’s online collections, programs, and social networks are being used.

The National History Coalition reports the welcome launch of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, a collaborative effort by a dozen federal agencies “to define common guidelines, methods, and practices to digitize historical content in a sustainable manner.” Anyone thinking of applying for federal funding in the next few cycles would be wise to keep an eye on this initiative. The standards established by this group are sure to turn up shortly in NEH, IMLS, NHPRC and other grant program guidelines.

Briefly Noted for June 12, 2008

Geek meme: Command line history. For about a month during the spring, geeks everywhere were using

history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5dt%s n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head

to post their top ten most used shell commands to the interwebs.

Samuel Pepys on Twitter. Good idea, but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I have enjoyed the Pepys Diary blog over the years, and I’d like to see it done in 140 characters or less.

A few months ago I recorded an interview with UC Santa Barbara professor, Claudio Fogu for an article he is preparing for History and Theory. Over the course of an hour or so, Claudio and I discussed the September 11 Digital Archive, the history of CHNM, and other topics of possible interest to Found History readers. Claudio has kindly allowed me to post the full audio of the interview. I can’t wait to see the article.

[audio:http://foundhistory.org/audio/fogu_interview.mp3]

Briefly Noted for April 11, 2008

A few quick notes from the National Council on Public History annual meeting in Louisville, KY.

Bill Turkel has a terrific post on the nonlinear character of many academic careers, comparing planning our professional trajectories to solving nonlinear optimization problems in mathematics. “Nonlinear” definitely describes my own career path, and Bill provides his own poignant nonlinear story. Students, especially those interested in careers in digital history and humanities, should hear more of these stories.

The Powerhouse Museum joins the Library of Congress in Flickr Commons. Though not officially part of the Commons, the Boston Public Library also added its own photostream to the online image sharing site. Maybe this Flickr thing has legs. 😉

Jeremy Boggs is starting a much needed new series on the nuts and bolts of doing digital humanities work. I am first to plead guilty when I say that too much of the digital humanities blogosphere is taken up with reflections on the discipline, project announcements and press releases, and wishful speculations that will never bear fruit. Jeremy is boldly taking us down the path of real work, by explaining the basic methods, processes, and tools necessary to produce quality digital history and humanities projects.

Briefly Noted for April 8, 2008

Friend of CHNM, Stan Katz provides some perspective on The Emergence of the Digital Humanities in his excellent Chronicle of Higher Education “Brainstorm” column.

Timelines.tv presents 1000 years of British history through a series of film clips organized along three parallel and interlinked timelines, one each for social, political, and national (English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish) history. Very high quality content (originally filmed for the BBC) distributed in a very popular format (the timeline). And a pretty slick website to boot.

Open Source Decade. Ars Technica recalls Tim O’Reilly’s 1998 “Freeware Summit” where “open source” first emerged as a term of choice in the free, open, libre, etc. software movement.

Briefly Noted for March 25, 2008

Wikihistory is a short science fiction story about a group of future time travelers’ journeys to the mid-20th century. Structured as a series of posts to a message board or wiki, Wikihistory is good mix of alternative history and science fiction, which in several ways again makes the point that science fiction is often just history in disguise. (Thanks Rob and Feeds.)

Ken sends Yahoo’s list of the ten most historically inaccurate movies. Granted, all of them—Braveheart, The Patriot, Gladiator, 300—have their problems. But it would be very easy to find ten more egregious offenders than these.

Curacao, Triple Sec, Cointreau, Grand Marnier? Confused about the difference or trying to decide which tipple to use in your Cosmo? A London “cocktail enthusiast” provides relief with a short history of orange liqueurs.

Briefly Noted for March 11, 2008

How to make a Leyden jar out of a two-liter Coke bottle, from MAKE Magazine.

Top Ten Moments in Sitcom History. I think you’d have to put Lucy and Ethel’s stint at the conveyor belt at the top of the table, but a good list nevertheless. (Thanks, Jerm.)

Prolific “junior ranger” Chance Finegan on the history of Mt. Rainier National Park.

Keeping with my management kick, here are 14lessons from 37signals for good digital project management and organizational development.