Find paths to the digital history news

Digital Archive Offers Glimpse into the ‘Dark Side’ of the Enlightenment

2009-07-22T22:22:29Z

Stanford French professor Dan Edelstein recently announced the launch of a digital archive of enlightenment texts to help scholars better research and understand the "dark side" of the enlightenment. [read more...] Digital Historian

UK National Archives on Flickr

2009-07-16T13:15:30Z

There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.

But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.

The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).

Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.

Life cycle of a digital object. Hands-on experience from laser scanning to visualization and 3D printing

2009-07-16T10:09:14Z

Start: 03/09/2009 End: 04/09/2009 Timezone: Europe/London Following UCL’s conference on 3D Colour Laser Scanning in March 2008 we are planning a 2-day workshop exploring the lifecyle of a digital object. [read more...] Archaeology and 3D technology

The whole NPG / Wikimedia thing

2009-07-15T09:11:20Z

There’s acres and acres of stuff to read and write about the whole National Portrait Gallery legal action threat against Wikimedia contributor Dcoetzee and his addition to the Wikimedia collection. I’m not going to try and add to the noise too much but it would seem apposite to at least comment given my current thread of presentations and posts is all about freedom, openness and MRD.

As always (just like the argument currently brewing about Free), there are two possible dangers in any debate like this. First, we go into too much detail and lose the view of the house because we’re examining the bricks too closely. Second, we polarise the debate.

I’m good at polarising, being a bear of simple brain – particularly when it comes to copyright. Simply, I don’t think it works in many cases, and I think this particular example holds – on many levels – great reasons as to why not. Cross-country, cross-domain, cross-sector, hidden images, non-hidden images, etc etc. This level of complexity doesn’t hold well with users, and they will abuse, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Having said that, there are clearly two sides to this particular debate, and actually I think both sides are being pretty reasonable. NPG have offered medium sized pictures; Wikimedia has been on the case for some years seeking access to these (arguably) public domain images. The discussion over the detail in this particular case will ramble on; the legal threat will be sorted out of court; everyone will ultimately go away at least semi-happy.

The bigger picture is the more important question, and it is this: why are cultural institutions putting collection (images) online? I ask this as an open question, as un-loaded as it can be (given you probably know where I’m coming from on this).

The possible answers are these (none is mutually exclusive, by the way):

to sell them / variations of them, such as prints, etc
to increase exposure to them
to increase exposure to the holding institution
to increase ticket sales / physical visits to the holding institution

So with these in mind, I think the important questions in this particular debate are not about the devil detail of cross-country copyright or whether Dcoetzee “should” have done what he did. I think they are:

does the exposure on Wikimedia increase exposure? (Answer: yes)
does exposure of hi-res pictures stop people from buying them (Answer: unknown, but possibly not)
does the exposure of the images improve the standing of the institution (as being a place that “has a great collection”) ? (Answer: yes)
does the exposure of the images increase click-through to the NPG website (and hence, assuming at least some kind of connection between traffic and physical visits) ? (Answer: unknown – I’m about to submit a FOI request to see if we can find out, but probably yes)
does the threat of legal action make NPG look good? (Answer: not really)

There’s some great questions here, which I’ve been asking our sector to answer for a while. Where is value in a networked age? How does virtual equate to physical? Does exposure increase or decrease physical sales (go ask Anderson or Gladwell this one…).

Just as a closing thought, I wonder if the NPG will be chasing Yahoo! for this YQL query or Google Images for this one? I suspect not.

Posted in content, museum, technology Tagged: collections, copyright, mrd, npg, wikimedia

Pushing MRD out from under the geek rock

2009-07-13T19:03:17Z

The week before last (30th June – 1st July 2009), I was at the JISC Digital Content Conference having been asked to take part in one of their parallel sessions.

I thought I’d use the session to talk about something I’m increasingly interested in – the shifting of the message about machine readable data (think API’s, RSS, OpenSearch, Microformats, LinkedData, etc) from the world of geek to the world of non-geek.

My slides are here:

Here’s where I’m at: I think that MRD (That’s Machine Readable Data – I couldn’t seem to find a better term..) is probably about as important as it gets. It underpins an entire approach to content which is flexible, powerful and open. It embodies notions of freely moving data, it encourages innovation and visualisation. It is also not nearly as hard as it appears – or doesn’t have to be.

In the world of the geek (that’s a world I dip into long enough to see the potential before heading back out here into the sun), the proponents of MRD are many and passionate. Find me a Web2.0 application without an API (or one “on the development road-map”) and I’ll find you a pretty unusual company.

These people don’t need preaching at. They’re there, lined up, building apps for Twitter (to the tune of 10x the traffic which visits twitter.com), developing a huge array of services and visualisations, graphs, maps, inputs and outputs.

The problem isn’t the geeks. The problem is that MRD needs to move beyond the realm of the geek and into the realm of the content owner, the budget holder, the strategist, for these technologies to become truly embedded. We need to have copyright holders and funders lined up at the start of the project, prepared for the fact that our content will be delivered through multiple access routes, across unspecified timespans and to unknown devices. We need our specifications to be focused on re-purposing, not on single-point delivery. We need solution providers delivering software with web API’s built in. We need to be prepared for a world in which no-one visits our websites any more, instead picking, choosing and mixing our content from externally syndicated channels.

In short, we now need the relevant people evangelising about the MRD approach.

Geeks have done this well so far, but now they need help. Try searching on “ROI for API’s” (or any combination thereof) and you’ll find almost nothing – very little evidence outlining how much API’s cost to implement, what cost savings you are likely to see from them; how they reduce content development time; few guidelines on how to deal with syndicated content copyright issues.

Partly, this knowledge gap is because many of the technologies we’re talking about are still quite young. But a lot of the problem is about the communication of technology, the divided worlds that Nick Poole (Collections Trust) speaks about. This was the core of my presentation: ten reasons why MRD is important, from the perspective of a non-geek (links go to relevant slides and examples in the slide deck):

Content is still king
Re-use is not just good, it’s essential
“Wouldn’t it be great if…”: Life is easier when everyone can get at your data
Content development is cheaper
Things get more visual
Take content to users, not users to content (“If you build it, they probably won’t come”)
It doesn’t have to be hard
You can’t hide your content
We really is bigger and better than me
Traffic

All this is is a starter for ten. Bigger, better and more informed people than me probably have another hundred reasons why MRD is a good idea. I think this knowledge may be there – we just need to surface and collect it so that more (of the right) people can benefit from these approaches.

Posted in content, copyright, museum, technology, web2.0 Tagged: api, communication, content, copyright, free, geek, jdcc09, linked data, machine readable, mrd, rss, technology

Scraping, scripting, hacking

2009-07-07T11:54:05Z

I just finished my talk at Mashed Library 2009 – an event for librarians wanting to mash and mix their data. My talk was almost definitely a bit overwhelming, judging by the backchannel, so I thought I’d bang out a quick blog post to try and help those I managed to confuse.

My talk was entitled “Scraping, Scripting and Hacking your way to API-less data”, and intended to give a high-level overview of some of the techniques that can be used to “get at data” on the web when the “nice” options of feeds and API’s aren’t available to you.

The context of the talk was this: almost everything we’re talking about with regard to mashups, visualisations and so on relies on data being available to us. In the cutting edge of Web2 apps, everything has got an API, a feed, a developer community. In the world of museums, libraries and government, this just isn’t the case. Data is usually held on-page as html (xhtml if we’re lucky), and programmatic access is nowhere to be found. If we want to use that data, we need to find other ways to get at it.

My slides are here:

A few people asked that I provide the URLs I mentioned together with a bit of context. Many of the slides above have links to examples, but here’s a simple list for those who’d prefer that:

http://hoard.it as an example of “intelligent scraping” being used to take on-page content and re-deliver it as “nicer” machine-accessible content
Yahoo! Pipes being used to scrape segments of this page using the Fetch Page module
Google Docs being used to scrape this page using the importHTML() function (see Tony Hirst’s excellent blog post for a better example)
Dapper being used to scrape pages with this shape and display extracted data
YQL being used to scrape this page and deliver search results into a REST query
HtTrack for downloading entire websites / sections of websites
RegEx visual tool
HTML Tidy, a tool for cleaning up “bad” html, available as both a download and a COM object for use in your scripts
Using OpenCalais for doing natural language text parsing (example form here)
Yahoo! Term Extraction – example form here
Yahoo! Geo
Freedom of Information (example from Frankie Roberto), OCR (from me) and Amazon Mechanical Turk

Phew. Now I can see why it was slightly overwhelming

Posted in museum Tagged: api, content, data, feeds, libraries, library, mashlib09, rss, talk

THATCamp hopefully the Model for Future Conferences

2009-07-03T14:43:31Z

I have finally returned from my end of month traveling and am getting back to work on my current project (more on that later). But for now I wanted to join an ongoing conversation, about what was one of the most productive academic conferences I have been to: THATCamp. First, let me say mad props should be given to David Lester and Jeremy Boggs the two who organized it, as well as praise to the Center for New Media and History for hosting it.

I have been thinking a great deal since last weekend (when this conference was) about what made it so different from other academic gatherings. Many of the participants agreed with this sentiment, and many are talking about organizing others with a similar organizational structure. So, I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections as a way to improve THATCamp in the future, and more importantly as a way to encourage other conferences to adopt some of its features.

First a brief introduction for those not familiar with THATCamp or gatherings of its ilk. (For those who are familiar you might want to skip this paragraph as it is sure to bore you, and I am bound to get something wrong which might just confuse the matter.) My guess, although I don’t this for certain is that THATCamp takes its inspiration from BarCamp and FooCamp. The idea behind this type of conference (conference is perhaps the wrong word, indeed organizers often refer to it as an unconference, gathering is probably closer, although that is not very descriptive either). The idea is that rather than have a rigidly designed program at the start, with panels which feature speakers who dominate the break out sessions, participants themselves decide the breakout sessions, with each session being structured as a conversation rather than a presentation. Think of it as a wikiconference. For those who haven’t been to one I realize you might be thinking this sounds chaotic, unorganized, and less than productive. You would be right about only one of those: chaos (but it is a really productive sort of managed chaos).

Let me start by re-itterating something I started with, that this conference was by my evaluation tremendously successful. Indeed, if I was only able to attend one conference/gathering next year, I would probably chose THATCamp. Usually I am very resistant to conferences, I think they are far less productive than our profession makes them out to be, but THATCamp was the antithesis of the typical intellectual masturbation of most conferences. Why? Because you actually learn something, and collaborate on knowledge production. Rather than go to a panel and listen to somebody read a paper for 20 minutes telling you how smart they are, only to suffer through a question and answer period where nearly every person asks a question that is meant more to demonstrate how smart they are (the typical I don’t have a question but a comment where the questioner talks for five minutes) rather than generate conversation. THATCamp works precisely against this logic. If I want to read someone’s long form argument I am better off reading the 20 pages or so on my own time, rather than paying for a plane flight, a hotel for several nights, and having them read it to me in a hotel conference room with bad acoustics. I have for some time thought that the importance, or the real academic purchase of conferences is what happens after the panel (aside from networking which also happens after the panels) most of the better conversations have been had outside of the sessions where dialogue can happen. THATCamp makes those conversations the center of what happens rather than the supplement. Every hour and fifteen minute session is a conversation rather than a series of structured monologues.

Perhaps obviously the thing that made the conference so worthwhile was the people. This is probably a bit of a chicken and egg issue though, as the format of the conference probably attracted good people just as much as the participants made the conference good. There were a number of people whose work I had always respected from a far, or only ever knew through online communication so the conference afforded an opportunity to meet these people in physical space. But aside from the people what made the conference so successful?

Ideas not conclusions: Most conferences seem to be structured around individuals presenting conclusions of their research, or their final statements. Read a 20 minute paper, defend your thesis. THATCamp was markedly different, instead each session was more about generating ideas, testing out thoughts, and sharing perspectives. Thus individual egos were mostly put on hold in favor of trying things out, testing thoughts. Its really hard to overstate the importance of this, or even to fully capture what happened in each session, but by removing the “defend your thesis” from being the center of the conversation, the discussions turned out to be far more productive.

Organized Chaos: When I describe the format of this conference to some more traditional academics, they look at me weird, and usually ask “how could this possibly work?” “Don’t you need a program and strict organization ahead of time?” The answer is really no. Leveraging internet technologies and being comfortable with a flexible schedule allows for a bottom up organization where the participants determine what is important, rather than organizers deciding ahead of time what works for the participants. It probably helps that those who attended were familiar with the ethos of Web 2.0 where this kind of organization works. Simply put the conferences organizers designed a good “platform” and let the participants work and rework the “content.”

Keeping it Brief: Honestly I don’t need to hear you speak for 20 minutes. Lots of people with short ideas can be more productive than a few with really long ones. One of the more fascinating parts of the weekend was “dork shorts” where presenters had three minutes to demo a project they were working on. The organizers kept people to this schedule (think gong show but rather than a gong you were ushered off by keyboard cat if you went over time). So, by the end of lunch I had seen maybe 15-20 projects. Some useful for me, some not, but the ones I was more interested in, I got to follow up on.

Twitter: Seriously, I know some people here think I make too much of twitter, but it really added to the conference experience. Unlike many conferences without internet connections THATCamp had wifi throughout the weekend. (A couple of times it buckled under the strain of 100 overly connected academics, their netbooks, computers, and iPhones, but this only happened briefly.) This meant that participants could leverage the internet to enhance the session experience. Not the least of this was using twitter. So, those who were not at THATCamp could follow along, you could follow concurrent sessions, but perhaps most importantly it served as a sort of live organic note taking process, in addition to being a backchannel. You can see the archive here. Tech savvy participants also took advantage of the network to produce a wiki of the event. The twitter activity and collaborative note taking is definitely something other conferences can learn from.

Doing it on the Cheap: The conference was free. That’s right free. They asked for donations of $25 per participant, but no one charged at registration. Rather than host it at some big swanky hotel it was held at George Mason, thus cheaper. Breakfast on two days and lunch was included. I think I heard that the conference cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3500 to host. My guess they made most of that back in donations. (Note: If you haven’t donated you should do so now.)

Diversity and Similarity: THATCamp was a good mix of people of diverse backgrounds within the humanities, but with similar interests. This meant that there was a mix of people with coding and technical background and a people more like myself, some technical knowledge but by no means an expert. This really helped in the sessions. My sense from some of the post THATCamp discussion was that some of the coders wanted more “hacking” (or coding time) and a little less discussion, so perhaps the panels were weighted a little in favor of conversation and less in production, but I think future conferences could easily change the percentage here. The key though is the mix of technical abilities and disciplinary approaches. Many academics talk about being interdisciplinary, few ever are. There was also a pretty good spread of students, staff, and faculty. In fact one usually had little idea who was who—and that was a good thing. My conference experience has often been that the conference reproduces the hierarchy of the institution, with faculty dominating conversations and ignoring the voices of the non-tenure track. No such thing here at THATCamp, I met undergrads, librarians, coders, and faculty alike. No one cared.

Size Matters: This is probably the unfortunate part of THATCamp: they capped the enrollment, turned people away. This had the positive effect of keeping the conference small, but the negative effect of limiting participation. I think the small feel really added to the sense of it being a friendly conference rather than an academic performance, and adding to the number of participants I think would really change this dynamic. I am not sure one could have more than 150 participants without seriously changing the dynamics. The up side is that the participants made it part of their participation to communicate to those not at THATCamp what was going on. I think in future iterations it might be nice to capture the video (or at least the audio) and turn it into a podcast. But more importantly nothing prevents there from being a lot more of these, several a year in fact, perhaps in different parts of the country, and with slightly different foci.

Here’s hopping that this serves as the model for more conferences like this. Maybe even outside of the digital humanities (but I won’t hold my breath for that one).

Paradoxes of Image in Digital Era

2009-06-28T13:16:21Z

Browse your Omeka archive visually with Cooliris

2009-06-24T20:24:27Z

We’re pleased to release a new Omeka plugin today: the MediaRSS plugin for the Cooliris image viewer. This plugin makes your archive browsable using the popular Firefox extension that “transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for enjoying online media.” The ability to zoom into images and browse a visual wall creates a new way of navigating through your Omeka site.

Go ahead and download version 1.0, and follow the instructions on how to install the plugin in your theme.

http://research3.org

2009-06-23T14:59:20Z

A theme run by the eScience Institute in Edinburgh may be of interest to subscribers. They have a number of initiatives coming up including a user-engagement workshop to be held in Jan/Feb of 2010. [read more...] Social Software in the Digital Humanities

Introducing Image Annotation Plugin 1.0 Beta

2009-06-23T16:04:35Z

Have you ever wanted to annotate your images on Omeka like you can on Flickr?

Now you can with the beta release of Omeka’s Image Annotation plugin! Using an adaptation of Chris Woods’ jQuery plugin, jquery-image-annotate, Omeka’s new Image Annotation plugin allows users to add textual annotations to images. To add an image annotation, users select a region of the image and then attach a textual description. The plugin offers a searchable annotation page for admins, an image annotation gallery for item pages, and a configuration page that allows admins to specify plugin permissions for different types of users.

Download, install, and test the plugin. Start annotating your images on Omeka and let us know what you think.

Information Access via Web 2.0

2009-06-17T17:52:00Z

Information is sometimes difficult to get. The process of providing accurate news and accessing information NOW involves Twitter, blogs, and other Web 2.0 programs are putting the "peoples' journalism" on our screens concerning post election news in Iran. How do we know what is valid and what is not? Start with a source you know, like major newspapers online, BBC News or academic sites highlighting international affairs, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and Christiane Amanpour, an expert from CNN news. The Huffington Post has been making news about its extensive coverage of this topic completely using the tools of Web 2.0. The NYTimes site to supplement the messages from their reporters in Iran is The Lede at http://tinyurl.com/nyrfgo Don't forget:
Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/
Twitter Search http://search.twitter.com
YouTube Search http://www.youtube.com/#
Twitter is a source of much news of the current news: http://twitter.com/#iranelection

The photo is from June 17, Christian Science Monitor, one of the most highly rated news sources for balanced coverage.

One Week, One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barn Raising

2009-06-15T15:45:00Z

I’m very happy to report that CHNM has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities under its Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities program to do for the summer scholarly institute what THATCamp is doing for the scholarly conference. Under the banner of “better, faster, lighter”—as well as more pragmatic, more collaborative, and more fun—CHNM will host a diverse group of twelve digital humanists for a busy week of tool-building in Summer 2010. Welcome to One Week, One Tool, a digital humanities barn raising.

With a decade of successful digital tool-building experience under its belt, we at CHNM have come to the conclusion that effective digital tools are forged mostly in practice rather than theory. Although inspirational ideas and disciplinary training are necessary, the creative process succeeds or fails due to pragmatic, often hidden or ignored fundamentals such as good user interface design, thorough code commenting and documentation, community engagement, dissemination and “marketing,” and effective project management. We may have a vision for an ideal end product, but frequently a tool is made or broken in seemingly more mundane aspects of software development.

Too often these practical aspects get lost in our conferences and workshops, only to be encountered by inexperienced tool builders at later stages of development and release. We thus believe a useful digital humanities institute should involve a great deal of doing in addition to basic instruction. There is no reason that a week long institute can’t both teach and produce something useful to the community—an actual digital humanities tool—while also laying the foundation and skills for future endeavors by the participants. Indeed, the act of doing, of building the tool, should be the best way for participants to learn what digital humanities really is and how it really happens.

We therefore propose a unique kind of institute: One Week, One Tool will teach participants how to build a digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week—a digital humanities barn raising.

One Week, One Tool won’t be for the faint of heart. For one week in June 2010, from early mornings to late nights, we will bring together a group of twelve digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and practical experience to build something useful and useable. A short course of training in principles of open source software development will be followed by an intense five days of doing and a year of continued community engagement, development, testing, dissemination, and evaluation. Comprising designers and programmers as well as project managers and outreach specialists, the group will conceive a tool, outline a roadmap, develop and disseminate a modest prototype, lay the ground work for building an open source community, and make first steps toward securing the project’s long-term sustainability.

One Week, One Tool is inspired by both longstanding and cutting edge models of rapid community development. For centuries rural communities throughout the United States have come together for “barn raisings” when one of their number required the diverse set of skills and enormous effort required to build a barn—skills and effort no one member of the community alone could possess. In recent years, Internet entrepreneurs have likewise joined forces for crash “startup” or “blitz weekends” that bring diverse groups of developers, designers, marketers, and financiers together to launch a new technology company in the span of just two days. One Week, One Tool will build on these old and new traditions of community development and the natural collaborative strengths of the digital humanities community to produce something useful for digital humanities work and to help reset the balance between learning and doing in digital humanities training.

Are you ready to rumble?

Omeka 1.0 Drops Today

2009-06-02T18:44:35Z

If you have been waiting to try Omeka, today’s the day.

Today the Omeka team at CHNM and our growing developer community are celebrating the release of Omeka 1.0. This production-grade release marks the completion of Omeka’s basic requirement set. Maintaining our commitment to serious web publishing for scholarship and cultural heritage, Omeka 1.0 incorporates unqualified Dublin Core metadata for organizing and displaying collections; support for extensible element sets; robust, flexible theme and plugin APIs; and plugins for Zotero compatibility, static page creation, and building sophisticated online exhibitions.

New with Omeka 1.0 is an improved exhibit builder; support for associating and displaying file-type icons; JPEG2000 support; and new import plugins, including a CSV importer and an OAI-PMH harvester. Moreover, with the addition of an OAI-PMH repository plugin, Omeka can now serve as an OAI provider. Best of all, Omeka 1.0 maintains its five minute setup, its intuitive user interface, its easy design theme switching, its many site enhancing plugins, and its free support resources.

This is a major milestone for Omeka, and we are very grateful to the many supporters, evangelists, open source developers, forums contributors, funding agencies, and friends who made it possible. Over the next several months, the Omeka team will continue to release bug fixes, minor improvements, and additional plugins and themes. But most of our energy will be devoted to making Omeka available as a hosted web service, allowing Omeka users the choice of downloading and hosting their own installation of Omeka, or signing up for a hosted account at Omeka.net. Stay tuned.

Download Omeka 1.0 today.

Van Gogh Museum to help Wikipedia - Nieuws uit Amsterdam

2009-05-26T17:46:58Z

Van Gogh Museum to help Wikipedia
Nieuws uit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Next month, the Van Gogh Museum, NEMO and the corporate art collection of the ING Bank will welcome volunteers who come to take photos of their collection for Wikipedia. The photos will be made available to the general public on the basis of a creative ...

Why Wolfram Alpha Won’t Work for Historians

2009-05-26T17:49:58Z

In our most recent episode of Digital Campus one of the news items I had a particularly caustic view of was the new search engine Wolfram Alpha. My broader pronouncement in the podcast that WA will “sink like a stone” is predicated on the incredibly clunkiness of the interface and the fact that when the engine doesn’t understand your question or simply has no data to work with, it offers no help…just the statement “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” This alone will send users running back to Google or Yahoo.

But I am sympathetic to the attempt to bring more computational strategies to bear on the search and retrieval of information online. As databases of historical information get larger and larger we are going to need tools like WA (I can’t keep writing Wolfram Alpha) to help us crunch through those databases. So, for instance, I recently wrote something for our 1989 website on the economic causes of the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and needed some good old fashioned economic data to work with.

Here’s one reason WA won’t work for historians: Taking the data presented in the source I just linked to, one finds that a 1992 edition of World Bank Facts gives Hungary’s GDP per capita in 1989 as $2,580 (USD). To see what WA comes up with for the same question, I used the query “Hungary gdp per capita in 1989“. When you try this search, the result is a problem. WA offers a different result ($3,097) and a nice graph of Hungary’s GDP per capita between 1970 and the present.

How then can a historian (or student) reconcile the difference between the World Bank’s number and WA’s number? The obvious solution, and the one we teach all of our students, is to check WA’s sources. Here’s what I found–a list of around 30 sources (you’ll have to go to the site and click on Source Information to see them all) with the following disclaimer: “This list is intended as a guide to further sources. The inclusion of an item in this list does not necessarily mean that its content was necessarily used for any Wolfram Alpha result.”

Would you accept a paper from a student with no footnotes but a disclaimer like this one at the top of the bibliography page? No, I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, if my students actually knew that WA existed and I asked them to tell me Hungary’s GDP per capita in 1989, I’m willing to bet the answer I’d get is $3,097 not $2,580. And don’t ven think of asking WA for the GDP per capita or East Germany in 1989. Apparently East Germany never existed and even worse, the GDP per capita result for Germany offers no reference/mention of the fact that East and West Germany merged after 1989.

So, I now have to add WA to my list of websites and web tools to teach my students about in the “these resources have serious problems for historians” category.

Using Google News Timeline for African-American research - Examiner.com

2009-05-21T05:16:53Z

Using Google News Timeline for African-American research
Examiner.com
At this point, it looks like only results from the New York Times archives and Wikipedia are provided. Obviously, as an original source, the New York Times articles are the most valuable. The New York Times was established in 1851, so many events since ...

Wikimedia Foundation announces important licensing change for ... - ResourceShelf

2009-05-24T16:08:53Z

Wikimedia Foundation announces important licensing change for ...
ResourceShelf
…the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a resolution that will bring about significant changes to the way the content of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, will be licensed. This resolution follows a vote among the ...

Bookmark This! Beneath the Surface of Wikipedia

2009-04-23T17:19:32Z

Teaser:

A tool for teaching analytical thinking or classroom pariah?

Article Body:

Wikipedia, the online, open-source encyclopedia, is no longer a new kid on the research web, but questions about its merits and use in the classroom continue to recycle.

Wikipedia is perhaps the most extensive example of democratic scholarship on the web. Tens of thousands of volunteer contributors have collectively written, revised, and edited nearly 3 million encyclopedia entries in English and other languages. Almost any Google search on topics relevant to teaching and learning history (among other subjects) elicits a Wikipedia entry among the top five search results—and frequently it occupies the number-one slot.

How should teachers respond to the ubiquity and accessibility of Wikipedia?

Students regularly and unquestioningly rely on Wikipedia as a resource for assignments. How, then, should educators respond to its ubiquity and accessibility? Many teachers simply banish it from the classroom. Banished or not, the encyclopedia is unlikely to disappear, and students will continue to be among the millions of inquiring minds who use it daily as a first stop for information-gathering. Teaching students how to evaluate Wikipedia may be a better solution, then, than ignoring its influence.

In fact, a hard look at the value and limitations of Wikipedia offers practical experience to students in critical thinking and analysis of primary and secondary sources in any subject area.

Bookmarks!

Start with this video from North Carolina State University Libraries: Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface (in under 6 minutes). The video gives an overview of Wikipedia and how it works—pros and cons—and situates its use as a tool promoting critical thinking.

In Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, author Roy Rosenzweig, founder of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, answers "some basic questions about history on Wikipedia. How did it develop? How does it work? How good is the historical writing? What are the potential implications for our practice as scholars, teachers, and purveyors of the past to the general public?" (This article was originally published in The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 [June, 2006]: 117-46)

Carleton College Gould Library offers a faculty guide, Using Wikipedia. The article offers guidelines for using Wikipedia, suggestions about its role in the curriculum, and links to further analytical articles. Guidelines include a caution from Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, that the encyclopedia is not a definitive source. "It's pretty good, but you have to be careful with it." He advises students to use Wikipedia for an overview of a topic, but then, to hit the history books.

Jeremy Boggs, digital historian and creative lead at the Center for History and New Media, authored a detailed lesson plan for undergraduate history classes, Assigning Wikipedia in a US History Survey. Boggs describes the assignment and the process of implementation, but also explains the rationale and benefits of this curriculum module, which he considers one of his most successful assignments. "Most of my students have a difficult time understanding how to make an argument, how to differentiate between fact-based 'reporting' and analysis. By actually being forced to write a 'just the facts' report, they have been able to see the difference between the two." The module is adaptable to high school coursework.

Date Published:

Apr 29 2009

Image:

wikip.jpg

Digital Campus #42 – The Real World

2009-05-22T00:10:46Z

This week’s podcast looks at the fake, the real, the copies, and the bizarre: fake journals from Elsevier, the MPAA telling teachers to film their TVs, the University of Michigan asking for real uses for its copies of Google’s book scans, and Wolfram Alpha’s use of sources. Mills and I also give Tom a parenting quiz appropriate to the digital age. [Subscribe to this podcast.]