by Tom Scheinfeldt
NEH announces funding for Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.
A Visit to Yesterland – The Discontinued Disneyland. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Disneyland’s Mine Train, Flying Saucers, or Indian Village? These and other attractions, restaurants, and shops are now collected in Yesterland, a theme park on the Web.”
The Museum of Bad Album Covers. “Currently displaying 156 awful album covers!”
1990 Mac ad deemed fake. (Via Crunchgear.)
Stan Katz on collaboration in the humanities and CHNM’s Zotero.
Inaugural issue of Code4Lib Journal, chronicling “the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.”
History Nexus … like Digg, but for history.
The Digital Campus podcast rolls on. In recent episodes Dan, Mills and I discuss how to stay productive in a world of constant digital distractions; the pros and cons of moderated listservs vs. less mediated forms of scholarly communication such as blogs and social networking sites; the proper relationship between a museum’s virtual and physical manifestations; and issues of privacy in educational technology. It’s a lot of fun, and very often informative. Let me know what you think and if you have any topics you’d like covered in future episodes.
Those few of you who visit the Found History site directly (as opposed to reading posts with a feed reader), will know that over the weekend I overhauled the blog’s basic layout and design. The change was partly inspired by conversations Mills, Dan and I had on the latest Digital Campus, which got me thinking more carefully about what I really want for Found History and how best to meet those aims.
The first thing people will notice are changes to the navigation.
I liked my old design, but in the last few months it had become clear to me that the layout couldn’t accommodate all the content I need to display. I decided that nearly two years worth of posts required more than just a chronological archive, and though I tried to add categories to my old design, the two column nav couldn’t handle it. The increased length of the sidebar gave the pages just too much vertical scroll.
I also decided that I needed tabs for personal information like my CV and bio. When I first started blogging, I decided I wanted to keep some distance between Found History and professional identity. I put my blog at foundhistory.org and my personal pages at chnm.gmu.edu/staff/scheinfeldt. Yet over the past 20 months I have realized that it’s not really possible nor even desirable to keep my professional identity separate from my blogging identity. In some ways I have become Found History. Surely at this point as many people online know me as Found History as know me as Tom Scheinfeldt, and my work at Found History increasingly informs my other public history work at CHNM. Separating my personal pages and hence my professional identity from Found History implied (and perhaps really reflected) some shame and fear about the blog. Maybe that was true at one time, but it isn’t any longer, and it’s long past time to pull together these estranged strands of my online self.
The second change is that I’m now using an off-the-shelf WordPress theme rather than one of my own design.
I want strong branding and a visual identity for Found History, but I decided it doesn’t have to be a totally unique one. The work involved in maintaining a totally unique branding and custom theme for Found History through technology changes, upgrade cycles, and changing intentions and uses for the blog has become practically impossible for me. I just don’t have the time. This is a predicament similar to the one Dan found himself in as he struggled to maintain and finally abandoned his own blogging software. While maintaining a theme isn’t half as hard as maintaining an entire software package, the very same roll-your-own vs. out-of-the-box questions and tradeoffs are at work. Just as Dan decided to leave it to the WordPress open source community to maintain his blog’s infrastructure, I’m leaving it to the commons to maintain the trickier parts of my blog’s look and feel. That’s why I’ve chosen Cutline, a WordPress theme with a large and active user community and a committed developer core, to skin my site. For now it offers me the right mix of power and convenience. On the one hand, there are ample opportunities for customization—for example, the header images you’ll find across the site are all my own choosing; in fact, true to the spirit of Found History I took all the header images from creative commons licensed photos tagged “found” and “history” on Flickr. On the other hand, using Cutline should give me room to stop fiddling with my style sheet—you should find, for instance, that the site loads faster, pages render more exactly across different browsers and platforms, and fonts are easier on the eyes, though to be honest the theme could use a print style sheet. In short I think outsourcing Found History’s design for a time will let me focus more on posting, and that’s what I think Found History needs most of all right now. At least until I want to start fiddling with that style sheet again.
I haven’t mentioned our Digital Campus podcast since Episode 2 in March, but Mills, Dan and I are still going strong. In my opinion, the last few shows have been among our best, featuring guests Jeremy Boggs and Bill Turkel in Episode 6 and Episode 7 respectively and an extended discussion of training for digital humanists in the newly released Episode 8. Ken Albers also continues to post highlights from the oral history interviews we have done with key figures in Mozilla and Firefox in the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Podcast. This week’s episode is especially interesting, featuring a conversation with Blake Ross, the wunderkind of Firefox’s early development. Finally—proving that I’ve become thoroughly addicted to this podcasting thing—I’d like announce the launch of my new show, History Conversations, “an occasional dialogue with historians and history lovers about their interests, their ideas, and their lives in history.” In its pre-inaugural Episode 0, I test out my software and explain a little of the rationale behind the show. Fascinating stuff. My first real conversation will appear shortly in Episode 1. A search of the iTunes Music Store for “History Conversations” should turn up the feed, or you can subscribe directly using your favorite podcatcher.
If you haven’t subscribed already, Episode 2 of Digital Campus (“The Old and the YouTube”) is now available for your listening pleasure. Dan, Mills, and I chat about YouTube, Wikipedia, the Byzantine Empire, Cambodian wi-fi, and other hot topics in the world of digital humanities. Also ready for download from CHNM is Episode 4 of the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Podcast, featuring excerpts from an interview with Mike Beltzner. Enjoy!
This is also somewhat off topic, but I’m very pleased to announce the launch of Digital Campus, a new biweekly podcast that explores how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Come listen to Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and I talk about the launch of Windows Vista, the rise of Google Docs, and recent stories about Blackboard in our first episode. At the end of the show, we share links to the best free wiki software and sites on digital maps and books.
Subscribe to Digital Campus via iTunes or another subscription service at http://digitalcampus.tv
CHNM has just launched a new project called The Object of History. A partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the project aims at lower cost model for “virtual” museum field trips. It also tries to open up the work of museum curators to student scrutiny. For most students, history exhibits (like history texts) are black boxes, revealing little of the long hours of work and sometimes difficult negotiations required to produce historical knowledge. History students rarely get to see how we make the proverbial sausage. The Object of History aims to show them.
Kudos to Sharon and the rest of the team that produced this incredible new resource.
In a post today called Remember the old “Two Cultures” Debate? Tim O’Reilly points to Jon Bosak’s keynote at the XML 2006 Conference to show that C.P. Snow’s two cultures thesis is phooey. He writes that Bosak’s referencing of Kant and Donne “puts to rest the idea that engineers don’t know the humanities.” Maybe, but I wonder if O’Reilly would be so generous to us humanists as we take our own tentative steps across the two cultures divide.
I was happy to read in this month’s Public History News that the National Council for Public History’s Long Range Planning Committee has posted its working definition of “public history” on Wikipedia. In the spirit of “sharing authority,” the committee invites thoughtful edits and comments at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_history
