http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2010/04/fighting_a_social_media_addict.html?hpid=moreheadlines – interesting Post article about social media and college students trying to do without it for 24hours

I. Answer the following questions in the space provided below (OR on your blog):

• Start with top three things you liked about the class structure: Lax discussions, amount of in-class  group work time,
• Add the top three things you would change about the class structure.: Smaller classroom (does that count?), less time presenting (it’s a really good thing, but it seemed to get repetitive)
• Add one or two projects/topics that you think might be good for future iterations of this class to do. – Some other aspect of the James Monroe letters – cause they’re really cool; Life in Fredericksburg (any time period, colonial on)
• What advice would you give to future students who take this class?: listen to DTLT – they are your friends, and they are right. Learn some basic HTML first/take CPSC110, it will make your life so much easier

This class was a really great experience. It was really interesting to not only explore the theoretical discussions about digital history, but to work on such a large and involved project. The best aspect of this class was the ability to work with so many elements of technology and apply them to presenting history: such as blogs, simile, maplib, html code, and especially omeka. Overall, this semester was extremely rewarding.
I am very proud with how our project turned out. Coming from the beginning of the semester where there was so much confusion about what we were going to do, and how we could create our own website, to now when it is actually complete is amazing. Looking at our contract, we managed to fulfill every aspect of the contract, although not necessarily in the ways we had originally imagined. For example, we had originally imagined a larger, more visible tags page to help users search for people, places, events, and themes. Although we do have a tags page, it is different than we had originally intended because of how Omeka structures its pages by placing it within the Browse Items section rather than on the front page. Furthermore, we had originally intended for there to be only one map – and yet we ended up with two due to limitations on the available maps for the map group to digitize. Additionally, though both our maps are actively interactive, due to the limitations of the maplib program, not all of the locations on the Europe map are interactive within the map itself. However, I believe that the solution of listing these locations with their corresponding links to their letters was the best solution. Not only does this allow users to find letters for all the locations, having the most mentioned locations on the map allows users to see the geographic relationship between the most active, and thus arguable most important, locations during Monroe’s time in France. Lastly, the Simple Page order at the top of the page could not be ordered in the way that we wanted because of Omeka’s structure. However, the user interface remains incredibly usable and navigable.
Although the tags and maps were not what we originally imagined, I am incredibly impressed with how the rest of the site turned out. The exhibit layout is great: The transcriptions and summaries are easily accessed and the letter images are visible, allowing our goal of having users able to view the images and the transcription side by side if they wished. Additionally, the timeline, maps, and supplemental information look great, and are easy to navigate and read.
I am very happy with how our site turned out. It presents the material we wanted to present about Monroe and his time in France in the way we wanted to present it, and is, I think, a good resource for students. I think my entire group worked very hard to produce a great product – which is especially great in the face of the various transformations it went though throughout the semester.

Because I am tired of fighting, and because map-lib seems to be deleting markers randomly after the 20th marker, I have made an executive decision regarding our map of Europe.

Rather than including all locations, which was the plan, the map of Europe will only include markers for the twenty locations most mentioned in the letters. I have an idea for the other locations…map lib is cool, but frustrating at times.

…I should have known better than to jinx myself.

So, this last week has been a lot of html between the transcriptions and the map

There’s a little piece of html you need in order to embed the pdf as a link in the About the Letter sections of the exhibits. But – they’re done. All the transcriptions for the Thomas Pickney exhibit have been uploaded and their links worked as of last night (yay)

Even better…the map.

Map lib is really cool, I’m having fun with it. We received the final version of the North America map on Friday, a few days early – which was really nice because I was able to experiment with it and maplib. The Europe/North Africa map is due to us tonight, so I should be receiving it shortly.

Anyway…playing with map lib.

There’s a little tab in the “bubble” which allows you to switch to typing html. Using this, I was able to create the links to each letter containing the locations on the North America map. The little cartoon pointers were extremely tempting, and if there had been one in the shape of a little French hat or flag, I may not have been able to resist. But, as it stands, I picked a little purple balloon as our pointer.

Now, I’m just waiting for Europe. I even have all the HTML ready to put into the bubbles and crank it out.

In addition to making our map clickable and interactive (which I was super excited about), I managed to embed it in a simple page as an interactive map! I wasn’t sure if I could, since I know the Civil War hospitals group (i think) was having trouble with it. But I tried it, and it works, and it looks very neat. So, I was very happy that I wouldn’t have to send our viewers outside of the site to look at the map.

Now, to the practical side.

The pages at the top (not in the exhibits) look a little messed up, I know. Their order as it stands is: Browse Items, Browse Collections, Browse Exhibits, Timeline, About Us, About the Site, Further Research, Maps.

Logically, I think Maps should be next to Timeline because it is supplemental material, rather than splitting the supplemental material between the informational about stuff. I tried to change it, I did….I failed. I even saved all the html from each page into notepad text documents, deleted the pages, and re-uploaded them in order. That failed. So, for whatever reason, Omeka has chosen to align the pages this way, and is being stubborn about it. So, maps will just have to remain at the end after Further Research.

I mean, it doesn’t look bad. Just, to me it seems to be a little illogical. But, as long as it works.

Overall, we’re well on our way to having the site finished on time. We had a little confusion over some tags and a few transcriptions we had forgotten about. But those have been fixed, and all the transcriptions, summaries, timeline, and context will soon be on the site. Then, it will be time for editing.

Almost done! It’s a little exciting. Especially since the psychology students in our R&CD panel seemed at least a little interested in the site when they saw it.

Good luck all! Hope your presentations all went well.

So, the first article to catch my eye was The Historical Profession and Archival Education, simply because that’s what I’m looking at grad schools for. And, though the article was written in 2007, I can definitely see the author’s point – as, that I’ve looked at, all the best grad. school programs are in Library Science programs. Which in my view makes sense as technology gets incorporated into archiving – through digitization and new digital primary sources. Although I share the author’s concern about getting too far away from the history methodology, dual-degrees may be the best way to go, if only for a full range of training. Who knows, though, perhaps a degree can be worked out with the best of both. Although, having interned in the Ralph Rinzler archives, I’ve seen first hand how vital the information systems training is to the archival profession. Digitization for preservation is a large part of the job.

The second article which caught my attention was Digital History Reader about teaching resources. The caught my eye because just two weeks ago my friend (who’s a student teacher in history) were just talking about the best way to bring primary resources about World War II and the Holocaust into the classroom to engage students better. Although the Digital History Reader is not completely focused on primary materials, it is definitely an interesting and engaging tool with its layout and detailed exhibits. They do tackle an interesting question: How, when class sizes continue to increase, do we give students the same quality education? Their solution – creating exhibits asking questions with both primary and secondary materials, is very interesting.

Both of these articles raise interesting questions about the future of teaching history and  incorporating technology with it. Personally, I like how digital technologies overall expand the possibilities for historical education. Although changing archival education, archives are both meant to save valuable materials, but also allow them to by used for future research and education. Online digital archives have saved my but in several research papers, and seeing them continue to expand is really cool. It allows students to study more topics more widely than before, without having to leave their school campuses. So, in the end, adding the digital aspects to education can enrich one’s education much more than take away from it. Of course, I still like archives and handling the sources myself – but if you can’t, the digital is great.

So, I just got done showing my cousin the campus on her spring break college tour..that was nice

Anyway…I’m excited to show everyone what we did on the site last weekend. Seth and I accomplished soooo much, it’s basically an entirely different website…and it actually looks like one with items, collections, and exhibits. Unfortunately, the theme we chose is messing up the way we wanted the exhibits to be laid out..so we’re going to have to make some changes. But in the grand scheme of things…it’s all good.

Thanks images group for that tip about having to laboriously make every item and collection public…that saved us a lot of time and frustration

of course, we still have a lot of work to do to get ready for our official launch. I took stock last night of everything left and had a bit of a panic moment…but it will all work out in the end. I mean, most of it probably won’t take all that much work like the about us page, and uploading the transcriptions/summaries, but some of the contextual background information stuff and interactivity will.

So, it’s going to be a lot of hard work, but everyone’s working hard and doing a good job.

Has anyone heard back about research and creativity day? when is that supposed to happen again?

Oh: and because this is a history class, we’re dealing with post-revolution fallout…and i just can’t resist:

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Hey all,

I watched the Did you know 4.0 video…that was interesting. More information about the switch to a digital medium constantly.

Which, of course, is very cool. The google book idea is great – get these old texts to the widest possible audience – which I think is fabulous, for students, readers, and researchers.

However, as always…there’s that old fashioned technophobe part of myself that almost always prints out articles because i just don’t absorb them well off a computer screen because I just don’t take it as seriously and pay attention to it as much. Also, that bit of me that loves the library, adores printed books, and loved working in an archive…gets a little like, well, we lose something here in transition.

Which is strange, because i am also a child of the digital age and have had a hard time being separated from my computer and the internet in the past…go figure.

Anyway…google searching is fascinating to me, especially what people search for, and how google comes up with the results in what order. Personally, I like seeing what people search for, especially as a way to figure out how to get to the best information in the quickest way…considering the depth of the internet.

It’ll be interesting to see how things change…especially if google books has its way.

Now that we’ve gone through (almost all) our transcriptions, we’ve focused more on building the site. This is turning out to be far more hazardous.

Overall, it’s leading to disagreements and rethinking constantly over  everything, which we’ll go over more in class tomorrow.

The Site: Last Tuesday, we spent all of class in another room deciding on the site/exhibit/section/page structure. And we decided on it, and started building it. Then, Seth discovered Zoomify. A program which will allow us to zoom in and out of our images very nicely (once we can get it working). Now, we’ve decided to completely change the layout of the site and how the site will work. It’s a much better layout, actually, but unfortunately we can’t start building until we can figure out Zoomify and put every image through the image converter and upload them differently….Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of work. But worth it in the end…we think

The map: HUGE division we’ll talk about tomorrow. We gave the map group on Monday the list of places in Europe (and two in Africa) last Monday and told the, what we want. All good. Then they told us they could either do one map of Europe, or two maps, one of Africa and one of Europe. Then the argument started two on two: should we have one map or three: The Americas, Africa, and Europe. Well, all but 7-8 of the locations mentioned in the letters are in Europe, so two of us campaigned for one highly detailed map of Europe. The other two argue “why are the European locations more important than the American ones? Because JM is in Europe? We should have three maps…sigh, deadlock. Then the argument became, well, if the map group can knit the three maps together and we zoomify it, that could work…but we’re still waiting to hear back from the group on that one.

Then..the battle over battlefields…should we mark them because battles are so often mentioned in the letters, or just have them in the time line? If so, why only battles. How are battles being marked any more important than any other events in the letter – why shouldn’t we mark them all. Should we mark battles at all. Should we just include such things in the timeline. Lastly, should we mark anything extra because we’ve already given the map group a list of locations and landmarks…why should we suddenly change our minds now…on and on and basically deadlocked. So, for that, we may need input.

And..the timeline..which, admittedly, we should have remembered was in the contract sooner, but we have been so focused on getting transcriptions done. Right now, we’re just pulling events put of the letters. But I can forsee the next argument: which events should go into the timeline? Only events in the letters? Important events outside the letters as well? If not all events in the timeline, which events are important enough to be included? Why are certain events more important than others?….and so on

So, yeah….these next few weeks until April 16 are going to be rough…but, we’ll get through it.

Like in theatre…It all works out in the end.

How?? Well…that’s the mystery.

Hello all, I hope you all had a great Spring Break.

So, lots of updating to do.

Good news? My sections of the transcriptions are done – now, for the summaries

Also, from what we’ve talked about, it appears we could be nicely ahead of schedule on having all of our transcriptions and summaries done – which would be great.

Seth and I met with the map group yesterday (MacKenzie and Chris had to work), and that went great. But Seth will talk about that tomorrow. In regards to the map, i’m really liking what i see with the maplib.net tool. It seems that we could definately work with it to do what we want to do with the map interface. Work, yes, but hopefully it will work.

Today, we met in class as a general group meeting and got a lot of work done. Seth worked a lot over break seeing how we could format pages, and we tweeked that today. So, now we’ve decided our exhibit/page layout for the letters – which is great, so hopefully we can start uploading letters and summaries soon enough.

So, overall, good work all around, and we seem to be on the right track.

See you all on Thursday, Lexy

Hey All, I have 3 midterms tomorrow, and one friday so i’m going to make this quick.

First off – does everyone else have a new layout?? The dropdown menu is gone and it took me a good 10 minutes to get to this blog from the blog it brings me to automatically, and now it’s not letting me tag…so irritating

Anyway,

We’re revving up for Spring Break. We have so much to do by reading through all the letters so we can give the map group their information. So, not much rest during break, but at least we’re moving well along in our project. We have our long presentation tomorrow, so we’ll get to explain just about everything then.

Sorry this is so short, but I have SOOOO much other work to do

See you tomorrow, Lexy

…ooo, tags are working