2016 Practicum In Digital History

The article Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon was written by Amy E Earhart who is an associate professor in the English department at Texas A&M University which a research interest specifically in digital humanities and African American literature. In this article Earhart discusses what the use of the Internet was intended to do for the humanities and the reality of what is currently happening in the field of digital humanities. Earhart also pays close attention to the relationship between digital humanities and people of color, which are topics that she is qualified to speak on given her background and research.

The article begins with a hopeful idea, “we imagined that the free access to materials on the web would allow those previously cut off from intellectual capital to gain materials and knowledge that might be leveraged to change the social position of people of color”. This hope is founded on the principals that that people would have access to technology and free information. The reality of the situation is that information isn’t free. Information already gathered is hidden by ‘pay walls’ of scholarly subscriptions, and grants for research disproportionately disadvantage people of color. Her article states that of the National Endowment of Humanities Digital Humanities Start Up Grants from 2007-2010 only slightly above 30% represented the research, preservation, and recovery of texts from diverse communities.

Earhart discusses the differences in the types of projects found in digital humanities. She explains that there are small-scale projects that although scholarly will mostly go unfunded; these small projects are completed by a single person to maybe a handful of cooperating people. There are large-scale projects that are the work of institutions like libraries and museums that are funded but focus on technological innovations in sharing information rather than recovery and preservation of texts. Earhart’s concern is with the consideration and representation of diverse communities and she has found that both small scale and large scale projects have fallen short. A large-scale project like MONK was focused on data-mining and did not include diverse data in its analysis and small-scale projects like those recovered by Alan Liu in the Voice of the Shuttle which had been focused on diverse communities have high levels of projects being ‘lost’ or ‘removed’. This raised a huge red flag for me as a reader, how can things get ‘lost’ online?  Earhart doesn’t answer this question, but instead gives a warning that people working in the digital humanities should be wary about the decline of textual recovery and the exclusion of a diverse community especially in the shift towards large-scale externally funded visualization projects.

 A theme of Earhart’s article that rings through the other reading and video is ‘knowledge’, the access to ‘knowledge’, and the creation of ‘knowledge’.  In Tim Sherratt’s article, Life on the Outside: Collection, Contexts, and the Wild Wild Web, he discusses Trove which is an online database that is maintained by the National Library of Australia and the multitude of ways it is utilized by the public. Trove itself is a collection of millions of newspaper articles from all around Australia spanning over 150 years. Through Sherratt’s research he found that Trove had been cited in everything from funny blogs to serious scholarly work. He uses these examples of Trove being cited along with his own ‘wall of faces’ he created from documents found in the National Archives of Australia to discuss the discriminatory Immmigration Restriction Act, and the hype following the upload of over a million public domain images by the Mechanical Curator to Flickr as a way to open up a conversation with libraries, museums, and archives. Sherratt uses his examples to encourage institutions like museums to share their resources and images more frequently and at no cost to the viewer. He acknowledges the fear that institutions have that their objects will be misused and misrepresented. Having said that, Sherratt also states that the goal of these institutions and their websites is engagement. Engagement between the past and the present and between these institutions and the public, both of which are important to the funding and future of the digital humanities.

The video, Is Google Knowledge?, looked into the questions of what knowledge is and how it is created. The video gave John Locke’s definition of knowledge which in very basic terms was that knowledge is the connection of ideas. It built off of this to discuss Google as ‘networked facts’ that are linked to related facts,  ideas, and conflicting theories. The video also discusses an interesting question if Google-learned knowledge is any less effective than book-learned knowledge. There wasn’t a real answer to this question in the video, but from the readings and the video it seems as though any resources online can be used to advance knowledge or they can be misused and misrepresented. 

Discussion Questions:

 

– Earhart discusses the issues of underrepresentation of diverse communities in digital humanities projects and sites one of the reasons being the loss and removal of projects online. I’m sure we have all heard a warning from a teacher, parent, or friend saying “once something is up on the internet it is there forever…” and if that is the case how can things get lost? Furthermore in representing diverse groups within our own research do historians have to include race, gender, and class to be considered as having ‘good coverage’ despite the research topic?

-Within the walls of a museum you can provide detailed information and context for the objects, and despite providing the public with the proper details and tools for representing the object there will be the occasional patron that will not understand the exhibit and may use the information incorrectly. That being said institutions do employ people to safeguard the objects and provide the best possible explanation. Do we treat online archives similarly to an in-person exhibit?  For the security and integrity of these cultural objects, should institutions interact with people misusing their material online? 

-In the video, Is Google Knowledge, it brought up the concept of constructing knowledge and how it must change with technology. Are tags, databases, networks, etc. now vital to the way we learn and connect ideas? In terms of creating resources to educate the public, how much can you assume they know about technology? What is the line between providing the best technology and remaining user friendly?  

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Archives

• Worldcat
• Google Scholar
• Library Databases

Some of my information is much easier to access than others. As an example I will post two sources that I have been using recently, the Southern Israelite and Commentary magazine. The Southern Israelite is much easier to access because it hosted by the Digital Library of Georgia. Accessing Commentary is much more difficult because it is an active magazine and its digital access is behind a paywall, with a limited number of articles available to non-subscribers.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/issues/

http://israelite.galileo.usg.edu/israelite/search

I am also including an example of a picture that I have come across during my research. Generally photos involving relations between African Americans and Jewish leaders in the 1960s are staged and were designed with specific goals in mind, this one included. Most were taken either by larger civil rights organizations such as the NAACP or American Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee.

http://northerncity.library.temple.edu/content/american-jewish-conference-sov

 

http://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/XFM001/id/193/rec/76

 

http://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/XFM001/id/237/rec/130

To post on your assigned day, you must be logged in to the course site; posting options are available on the far left of the dashboard space under “Add New.”  The posting schedule is available as a PDF on Blackboard.  You may also start a post and save it as a draft to finish later without publishing; you are the only one who can edit your posts.  You don’t need to include your name or “by XYZ” in the text of your post, as your username will appear under the title once it’s published.

Posts should be about 500-800 words long (undergrad) or 1000-1500 words (grad) and must be posted by noon the day before the assigned class meeting. Posts must be in complete sentences and you will be graded on correct punctuation and grammar.  There is a word count tally at the bottom of the post box if you’re unsure about length.  Your post should synthesize for the class the major points of the assigned readings and assume that the audience (your classmates) have already read the assigned readings, as in a short review essay.  On days that we have how to readings assigned, summarize the purpose of the tools.  Be sure to think about your post as a very small essay; it should have an introduction, conclusion and paragraph breaks to indicate topic shifts as well as transition language between points so that your change of topic is clear to the reader.

The assigned readings should be linked in the text as you discuss them with “pretty links.”  Merely dropping in a url address like this: http://ahis290.maevekane.net/ instead of making a pretty link like this will lose one point.  To make a pretty link, type the text you wish to link, highlight it with your cursor, and click the little link icon in the formatting options bar.

Posts must include three discussion questions about the assigned readings and have a title–try to choose a title that is descriptive and ties together the thematic points of your summary.  Posts should also be set to the “readings discussion” category so that the course site stays easy to navigate as we add more things to it throughout the semester.  You must also add at least three tags (think of this as the metadata for your post).  What are your readings about?  Are your questions about the technical aspects or the thematic aspects (ie, wordpress vs. economic history).

For your discussion questions, do NOT pose yes/no questions.  Think big with how and why questions–why did a historic event happen, how does displaying information in certain ways affect the viewer’s understanding of it, why would someone use a tool, how is the tool limited, etc.  You’re also welcome to post clarification questions–how does a tool work, how do I make it do X?  Think about the discussion questions as a way of guiding what you want to talk about and cover in class that day.

You may, but you are not required to, include images in your posts.  You can do this with the “Add Media” button on the upper left, which will let you upload an image from your computer and then position it in the text.

When finished, hit the blue Publish button on the top right.  If you’re not finished, you can hit the “Save Draft” button above publish, in which case your saved post will appear in the list of “All Posts” on the far left of the dashboard when you want to come back to it.

You may compose the text of your post in an offline writing program, but be aware that software like Word sometimes includes strange formatting when you copy and paste in the post field.  To avoid this, right click in the post field and select “Paste and Match Style.”