In an interview on the most recent Digital Campus, PublicDomainReprints.org founder Yakov Shafranovich notes that one of the most popular uses of his print-on-demand service for public domain Google and Open Content Alliance books is to supply out-of-print manuals to latter day blacksmiths, pigeon breeders, and others still working in ancient, but declining, trades. Last month also saw the launch of the Obsolete Skills Wiki, an idea originally proposed by journalist Robert Scoble, which preserves such knowledge as how to dial a rotary phone or how to use the eraser ribbon on a typewriter. The Internet has been said to serve “the long tail” of consumers, the multitudes of niche buyers whose needs are not served by mass marketing, mass media, and the big box stores. Here are two examples of how it’s serving history enthusiasts out on that long tail.
Category Archives: Digital Humanities
THATCamp Deadline Approaching
Just a quick reminder to Found History readers that the THATCamp deadline is quickly approaching and space is getting tight. We’ve received lots of great applications, and it promises to be a fantastic weekend. If you’re free the weekend after Memorial Day, send us an application by March 15th to join us in Fairfax for digital humanities hotness.
Twitter as a tool for outreach
In an earlier post I wrote about the early buzz around Omeka, both in the forums and among education, museum, public history, and library bloggers. One thing I didn’t mention—and frankly did not expect—was the buzz about Omeka on Twitter, the popular SMS-centered microblogging, won’t-get-it-till-you’ve-used-it social networking platform.
Twitter has been getting a lot of attention lately as a tool for use in the classroom, including an insightful blog post and front-page video segment on the Chronicle of Higher Education website by University of Texas at Dallas professor David Parry. It turns out Twitter has also been a great way to build a community around Omeka—to get in touch with possible users, to keep in touch with existing users, to give the product a personality, and to provide information and support. Among other things, we have been answering technical questions using Twitter, connecting far-flung users with Twitter, and pointing to blog posts and press coverage on Twitter. Because the barrier to participation is so low—Twitter only allows messages of 140 characters or less—people seem more willing to participate in the discussion than if it were occurring on a traditional bulletin board or even in full length blog posts. Because every posting on Twitter is necessarily short, sweet, informal, and free from grammatical constraints, I think people feel freer just to say what’s on their minds. Because Twitter asks its users to respond to a very specific and very easily answered question—”What are you doing?”—it frees them (and us) from the painstaking and time consuming work of crafting a message and lets people just tell us how they’re getting on with Omeka. And because Twitter updates can be sent and received in many different ways from almost anywhere (via text message, on the web, via instant message), the Omeka Twitter community has a very active, very present feel about it.
I’m very encouraged by all this, not just for the narrow purposes of Omeka, but for digital humanities and public history outreach in general. Interactivity, audience participation, and immediacy are longstanding values of both public history and digital humanities, and Twitter very simply and subtly facilitates them all. The experience of the last week has proved to me that we should be doing this for all future projects at CHNM, not just our software projects like Omeka and Zotero, but also for our online collecting projects like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, our public exhibitions like the forthcoming Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, and our education projects like the forthcoming Making the History of 1989.
For now, if you’d like to join the Omeka Twitter community, you can sign up for a Twitter account and start following Omeka. If you’re not quite ready to dive in head first, or if you just want to keep an eye on what other Omeka followers are doing, you can simply subscribe to the “Omeka and Friends” public feed. Finally, if you want to see what I’m up to as well, you can find me on Twitter at (no surprise) FoundHistory.
THATPodcast Episode 2: Introducing Omeka
Jeremy and Dave are at it again. This time on THATPodcast they give us a video introduction to Omeka. Sticking with their two-segment format, the first half of the show features a discussion (in part by me) of the aims and values that underlie Omeka. The second half features a very helpful step-by-step demonstration of downloading and installing Omeka on a server. Great stuff.
Omeka Forums are Buzzing
It has been only three or four days since we released Omeka to the wild, and already we’re seeing some amazing interest. As of this posting, Omeka 0.9.0 has been downloaded more than 200 times, has been blogged by at least 50 authors, and for a brief time made the del.icio.us homepage “hotlist.” Most exciting to me, however, is the traffic to Omeka’s support forums, which shows that people are really using the software. Most of what we’re seeing are installation difficulties, especially where users are trying to install Omeka on third-party, commercial hosting services like Bluehost and Lunarpages.* The good news is that most of these problems can be worked out relatively easily, and I encourage anyone who is having trouble to take a look at the Getting Started and Troubleshooting forum threads and to post your questions there. Our crack team of developers will be happy to help out. Omeka is still in beta, and as an open source project, we hope everyone will feel comfortable joining the forums, becoming active in the community of users and developers, and just generally helping us make the software better.
* Note: if you don’t already have a hosting account and are thinking of signing up for one to try Omeka, we encourage you to consider Dreamhost, where Omeka has been most thoroughly tested and where we know it works seamlessly.
Omeka for All
As Steve Brier, Josh Brown, and Mike O’Malley pointed out in Episode 2 of History Conversations, CHNM’s late founder, Roy Rosenzweig firmly believed that it wasn’t enough for the historian interested in popular memory simply to be an analyst of popular historymaking. He or she also had to be an active practitioner of public history, making him or herself available to community, enthusiast, and other non-professional historians to help them in their efforts. True to Roy’s example and admonition, I aim to be both practitioner and analyst. But as the recent dearth of postings here on Found History attests, I have been doing a lot more practicing than analyzing lately.
Aside from general management stuff at CHNM, I have been spending most of my time and energy on Omeka. Just launched for general public download today, Omeka is CHNM’s latest software offering, a free and open-source platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. It complements CHNM’s successful Zotero project, providing cultural content producers with innovative, open-source presentation software in the same way that Zotero has provided cultural content consumers with innovative, open-source research management tools.
First and foremost, Omeka is intended to reduce the costs and improve the quality and functionality of online exhibitions. There are lots of software tools in the world of libraries and museums for managing and searching collections. There are almost none to help designers, webmasters, curators, librarians, and scholars publish and present those collections in rich, narrative, interpretive online exhibits. Omeka aims to fill this gap. Free, easy to use, and fully customizable through feature plugins and design themes, Omeka can bring rich, elegant, interactive, and “Web 2.0” ready exhibits to even the smallest and least well-funded of institutions—institutions for which high priced web design vendors are completely out of reach.
In the early days of the web, personal web pages were poorly designed, difficult to update and maintain, flat, and generally ugly. That all changed relatively recently with the advent and widespread adoption of blogging packages and services like WordPress, MovableType, and Blogger. Now a well designed, dynamic, interactive, and standards compliant personal website is just a few clicks away for practically anyone. Why should it be any different for cultural exhibits?
With Omeka, it shouldn’t.
A Look Back at Braddock
Another episode of the History Conversations podcast has dropped. This time, the volunteer historians of the Look Back at Braddock project join me for a conversation about the challenges and opportunities posed by local history. Located near the center of Fairfax County, Virginia, Braddock District has changed rapidly in the 20th century, and members of the community have taken it upon themselves to document the changes. Working largely without funding, John Browne, Mary Lipsey, Gil Donahue, and their colleagues have produced a rich oral history collection, a successful book, and a new website. What does it take for a group of committed amateurs to launch and sustain a multi-year history project and what keeps them going? Find out in Episode 3 of History Conversations.
THAT Podcast
I just finished watching the inaugural episode of THAT Podcast (“The Humanities and Technology Podcast”), the new video podcast from CHNM creative lead, Jeremy Boggs and CHNM web developer, Dave Lester. Wow. Considering Jeremy and Dave’s technical chops, I wasn’t surprised at the excellent production values. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at the quality of the discussion, either. Jeremy and Dave are both deep and wide-ranging thinkers and practitioners of digital humanities, and THAT Podcast reflects their depth and range. In this first episode, Jeremy and Dave discuss the popular blogging platform, WordPress and its applications for teaching, research, and presentation of results. The podcast starts with an interview with Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress and Web 2.0 wunderkind. Jeremy and Dave follow the interview with a brief hands-on introduction to ScholarPress Courseware, a plugin for WordPress they developed to make building attractive course websites quick and easy. I’m using it this semester in my Introduction to Western Civilization: Science & Society course, and so far I am very pleased.
I’m sure many Found History readers are also subscribers to Digital Campus. As I score it, however, it’s THAT Podcast, 3 – Digital Campus, 0. Not only did Jeremy and Dave score an amazing and hard-to-get interview for their first episode, they’re using video as well as audio, and they’re providing practical instruction in digital humanities rather than the usual chatter you get from the Digital Campus gang. Nice job, guys.
Forty Signs of Rain
This post may be even shorter than usual. I’m writing from Breckenridge, CO where I’m enjoying a couple (very cold) days of skiing. (The conditions are epic in case you’re wondering.) But I didn’t bring my laptop, so I’m writing this on my Blackberry. It seems to be working fine, but I don’t think I’ll have the patience or thumb strength for more than a couple hundred words or so.
Once again this semester I’m teaching a history of science-focused Western Civ. survey, and once again I’m using Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt to try to shake my students of their preconceptions about scientific progress and Western exceptionalism. I love Robinson, but I have read YRS several times now, so instead of YRS, I brought another of Robinson’s books with me on my vacation: Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in a trilogy about climate change in the very near future.
So far, FSR isn’t nearly as brilliant as YRS. It’s not even as creative as Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Nevertheless, even in the first 150 pages of this comparatively unremakable effort, Robinson’s seemingly endless font of knowledge is revealed again in an extended passage about the NSF panel review process.
A lot of public historians and digital humanists are very rightly baffled by the grant application and evaluation processes of NEH, IMLS, and other federal grant-making agencies. It is indeed a pretty arcane process, especially to the novice, but one good way to wrap your head around it is to serve as a panelist for a program in your field. I have been lucky enough to serve on a couple panels for NEH and IMLS, and in addition to a great intellectual experience and a fantastic way to make new friends in your field, serving as a panelist is probably the best way to learn what makes proposals succeed and what makes them fail. I guarantee your own grant proposals will be vastly improved by the experience. If you get a chance (the agencies frequently put out calls for panelists), I’d jump on it.
If you can’t serve on a panel, however, take a look at Forty Signs of Rain. Ignoring the intrigue and vaguely dirty progam officer that assist the broader plot line (I assure you, in my experience, actual program officers are among the most honest, impartial, and helpful people), in the first half of the book Robinson provides a very good account of the proposal and peer review process at NSF, which is more or less the same as that at NEH and IMLS. I’m not saying it’s right on the money, but as an easy and readable glimpse at the grant making process (especially pp. 134-145, where Robinson describes the panel room itself), it’s definitely worth a read. And if you’ve never read anything by Robinson, this is as good a reason as any to get started.
What Camp? THATCamp.
I’m very excited to announce our latest initiative at CHNM: THATCamp.
Short for “The Humanities and Technology Camp”, THATCamp is a BarCamp-style, user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities. THATCamp is organized and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Digital Campus, and THATPodcast. THATCamp will take place at CHNM in Fairfax on the weekend of May 31 – June 1, 2008.
What is an “unconference”?
According to Wikipedia, an unconference is “a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event.” An unconference is not a spectator event. Participants in an unconference are expected to present their work, share their knowledge, and actively collaborate with fellow participants rather than simply attend. There are many styles of unconferences. The most famous is probably BarCamp, an international network of unconference events focused largely on open source web development.
What should I present?
That’s up to you. Sessions at THATCamp will range from full-blown papers (not many of those, we hope) to software demos to training sessions to debates to discussions of research findings to half-baked rants. You should come to THATCamp with something in mind, and on the first day find a time, a place, and people to share it with. Once you’re at THATCamp, you may also find people with similar topics and interests to team up with for a joint session.
How do I sign up?
Unfortunately, we only have space for about 40-45 participants, so we’ll have to do some vetting. To apply for a spot, simply send us an email saying who you are, what you’re thinking about presenting, and what you think you will get out of the experience. Please don’t send full proposals. We’re talking about an informal email of maybe 200 or 300 words, max. If you want to attach a C.V., that’s OK too. Send your email to thatcamp.info@gmail.com.
Where?
The Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 1E7 Fairfax, Virginia.
When?
May 31 – June 1, 2008.
Who?
Anyone with energy and an interest in digital humanities.
How much?
As with most BarCamps, THATCamp will be free to all attendees. But a $25 donation towards snacks and diet coke will be much appreciated by the organizers.
How do I sponsor THATCamp?
A limited number of sponsorships are available to corporations and non-profits. Shoot us an email.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
