Final Project

http://sites.google.com/site/alumnimemory/home

Effectively Conveying The Past

Before claiming which sites most conveys the past to a “general” audience, I would like first to agree with Kevin Donovan's plea that: "Simply providing the public with access to data is insufficient to satisfy the goal of public education." Museums and historians need to realize that simply providing objects is not enough. With educational purposes, object-centered approach is not effective compare to the meaning surrounding that object. Especially with the new media, various interpretations, a richer environment and a deep interaction with the object itself is far more important than just the name of the author, creation date...
Speaking of effectively conveying the past to a “general” audience; I thought that on the one hand, the history channel website was best at it. It topics ranged from recreating the far past to telling the near past. Those topic includes people, the environment, events,...By having this limitless openness to the past, the history channel I think reaches and effectively conveys the past to a broader audience. On the other hand, by second choice, I believe that the Julia Child's Kitchen website also effectively conveys the past to a general audience. First the topic is quite practical. Almost everyone cooks on the daily basis. Second, she is herself famous (which means that a large and mixed audience is always hungry of getting to know her).

Digital Scholarship

Just about than decades ago, historians had to fly for miles or spend large amount of time in libraries, going through mountains of archives in order to retrieve a single piece of information. However, today and at this exact moment, a historian or a non-scholar some where sitting on a bed and wearing pajamas can go through an unimaginable amount of historical archives; moreover, interact directly with other people who are sharing the same interest with him/her. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.
Through the help of various web-search engines, a historian can get exactly what he/she wants by just typing a key word or sentence of the subject he/she want to get information about. “The way to make progress is to have more data.” Peter Norvig (video lecture). As the years are passing by, technology is getting more and more sophisticated, more and more data are being made available on the web every second. I believe that future historians and other scholars in general will be less likely to make effort in order to get information from primary sources documents. The abundance of data on the web will gradually keep on catching historians and scholars' attention and gradually redefine how future research will be conducted. Although, like Patrick Leary, I believe that digitized material will never replace the value, essence, and significance of actual historical materials. Nonetheless, those primary document will become less and less consulted because of their easy online accessibility. “This basic model for interacting with a text is simple enough, and so long as the number of online Victorian texts has been various but limited, most scholars have found this sort of searching and reading an occasional convenience, but hardly a fundamental challenge to their way of working with the period's primary sources. What will make that difference is not simply the ubiquity of the internet, or our students' (and our own) ingrained reliance upon it, but the sheer scale of what is coming online”(Leary, 2005, p77). Furthermore, “Search engines present, after all, a quite peculiar way of interacting with groups of texts; literal-minded, they bear out the old warning about being careful what you wish for” (Leary, 2005, p80). Historians and others scholars would have to keep in mind that more data could means more garbage. It is the historians' responsibility to deeply scrutinize their online material and strongly vet their sources. “The offline penumbra is that increasingly remote and unvisited shadowland into which even quite important texts fall if they cannot yet be explored, or perhaps even identified, by any electronic means”(Leary, 2005, p82).The new media is and will be the reason why many books and historical materials will go quite for a long time in some building's basement. It doesn't matter whether you advocate for the new media or not, but one reality is that, it changes us, our culture, “The conventional wisdom” , and above, the new media changes reality itself.


References

Leary, Patrick. 2005. "Googling the Victorians."Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 1: 72-86. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 3, 2010).
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&hid=8&sid=f271b9a3-896f-42c0-8501-1f087c66858a@sessionmgr12http://www.catonmat.net/blog/theorizing-from-data-by-peter-norvig-video-lecture/

American Council of Learned Societies (2006), Our Cultural Commonwealth.
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig; No Computer Left Behind; Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 24, 2006. http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=38

Digital Preservation

As the new media is becoming more and more accessible to people, more and more documents are being created in digital form: “Born Digital.” One thing that everyone can agree one is that, as the time is passing by, technology is rapidly and constantly changing. Looking at the new media from this prospective, a concern arises among lovers of born digital documents on how to safely preserve their digital creations. But before we all can be concerned about how to lastingly preserved what is in the web or in other digital format, we need to worry about determining what is worth preserving first. I believe that every content has the right to be preserved for the sake of preservation itself, and based in this concept that of one man's trash being another man's treasure. Moreover, the digital storage capacities are getting bigger and more affordable on the daily basis. The down side of this approach is the overload in the amount of material available. Also, this approach destroys the core value of “perceived importance” in the profession of archivists.

“Obviously you have to use some combination of hardware and software to create and serve your website, and it can be difficult to determine where the herd will go.”(Cohen and Rosenzweig, 2005)
Preserving a digital document is more complex than just an ink-paper document. With digital material, the creator should be careful and insightful when it comes to choosing the programing language which will ensure the future of the website's functionality or digital material. The format by which historians should represent their documents. Furthermore, Most digital documents become unreadable just because of the unpopularity in term of the format by which the document were saved under.

“No acceptable methods exist today to preserve complex digital objects that contain combinations of text, data, images, audio, and video and that require specific software applications for reuse.” (Margaret Hedstrom, University of Michigan) . I would agree with her because of the complexity of the new media and the occurrence of constant changes that happen within the new media. However, one thing that all web users and scholars would agree on is the use of back ups and a regular update of those back ups. If we look at preserving the digital past from this prospective, I can say that there is not and there will not be a definitive way of preserving digital material, simply because of all the changes that occur in the technology sector. Backing up data is not enough. The library of congress can back up all their data today and not be able to read it five years from now. I will confidently conclude that preserving digital material is a matter of updating old technologies' material in order to synchronize with future technologies.

Copyrights

After reading Cohen and Rosenzweig (Digital History, 2005, Chapter 7: Owning the Past?), I came to conclude that the this copyright concern among historians and other scholars is not different than the issue of “what is pornography?”.After being unable to describe what is pornography, the United States supreme court judge Potter Stewart said: “I had been a Marines officer; he a Navy officer. We discussed our experiences with material we had seen during our military careers, and discovered we had both seen materials we considered at the time to be pornographic, but this conclusion was arrived at somewhat intuitively. We agreed that “we know it when we see it,” but that further analysis was difficult.”(The Wall Street Journal, 2010). I think that 10 judges will come up with 10 different judgements on this issue of just "what is a copyright for the new media". The copyright is very complex and subjective matter which will remain constantly changing and very partial (either provide more favors to authors and minimize distribution of intellectual materials or provide more to much access to users and de-favorise the rights of authors to be recognized).
With Digital media, historians should be concerned:

First, the nature of copy right laws which is constantly changing. The copyright laws vary not just from one country to another but also a user can be held liable for violating the right of an author while being in another country. With the New Media (Digital Media), there seem to be no jurisdiction based land borders. Historians or scholars in could be using intellectual materials without knowing that those material are copyrighted in a different country.
In the case of GNU General Public License (2007), the Free Software Foundation grants a copyleft license which guarantees the recipient's freedom to share and change all versions of a program, to make sure it remains free software for all its users. Here, the biggest issue historians should worry about is originality. If I create a digital material and pass it on to someone else, does whatever the next person creates is original? http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html Moreover, institutions such as Museums should start worrying about pirate materials (Free Culture, 2004).

Second, the notion of creativity can be fuzzy and blurry to determine. Cohen and Rosenzweig (2005) state that copyrightable works must reflect a minimal degree of creativity and originality.,http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/3.php Now the question is: Who determines that is a minimal degree of creativity? When DJ's mixes songs is it creative? Is it enough for DJ's to comodify those products?
In The MIT Press article: The case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2006), John Willinsky argues about the place of scholarly work in a world dominated by the new media and about he future of knowledge. He thinks that open access is a public good. He claims that the scholarly work carries with it the responsibility to be widely accessed and circulated. For John Willinsky, the right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. However, I think that John Willinsky is missing the fact not all scholar work is done for the sake of knowledge. There is a lucrative aspect as well. Although Scholars (historians) are less likely to be concerned by the lucrative aspect of their work rather than to their reputation, still the money is a great motivator for scholars to copyright their creations. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10611

Third and finally, the notion of “fair use” is very open ended. What is fair use? Who should draw the line between fair use and a violation?
In the book Free Culture (2004), when it comes to the issue of Free Use versus Fair Use Lawrence Lessig states that an author can deny the release of a movie to a movie maker even though that is not his/her writing. These “Exclusive Right” given to authors by the congress for “their writings” is just absurd. It gives too much power to authors. http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

Cohen and Rosenzweig (Digital history,2005): Owning The Past?

Just like Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University law professor), who have promoted the notion of the internet as “Creative Commons.” We all like to think of the web as a place where creators and users meet. And sometimes as creators, we find ourselves becoming users of others intellectual creations. This is where the copyright issue arises.

According to Cohen and Rosenzweig(Digital history,2005) thought that copyright law establishes a balance between the rights of holders and and the rights of users which is a give-and-take that rewards authorship but that also fosters the dissemination of knowledge for educational and academic purposes. Copyright laws change depending on the types intellectual property (digital material, paper written material, web material..), the country, and the philosophies of authorities in office. However, Cohen and Rosenzweig (2005) suggest that as historians, we actively participate in the process of shaping the copyright laws in order to make it more receptive to the sharing of ideas and expressions. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/1.php
Cohen and Rosenzweig thought that the advantages of digital media: First, flexibility,which allows you to combine sound, moving pictures, and images with text poses a major new challenge to digital historians. The rights for images, sound, and moving images are often more complex and more expensive than for text. Second, manipulability of digital data creates another, less common legal issue. Third, its global accessibility which by an author's intellectual property available to a broader audience or specific audience may easily help web user or historians to violate the rights of other authors. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/2.php

Cohen and Rosenzweig thought that not Even the most carefully placed or most threateningly worded copyright notice protect an author, if his/her work does not meet the requirement enunciated in the feist case that copyrightable works reflect a minimal degree of creativity and originality. This means that digitizing someone else's work does not grant the copyright protection. In general, historians are often most concerned about someone stealing their ideas, and the copyright law does nothing to protect ideas, only their formal and fixed expression. For this matter, Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest that the authors use license agreement notice and a log-in membership procedure for their websites. When it comes to universities and educational institutions, there is controversy on whether academic materials should be comodified and copyrighted or just be considered as shared intellectual materials. Nevertheless, Creative Commons has primarily encouraged copyright balance by offering free legal advice to those who want to promote an ethic of sharing and mutuality. With the help of some high-priced legal talent, the creative commons have developed a series of licenses packaged under the rubric “Some Rights Reserved.” For example, their “noncommercial license” permits free use and distribution of work only for noncommercial purposes. Other historians, who put a priority on getting their perspectives widely disseminated, might select the “attribution” license, which allows any site to display their work if it gives them credit http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/3.php.

Cohen and Rosenzweig clarifies that not every material is published after 1923 is necessarily copyrighted. For a website or any other material to be copyrighted,it requires a notice of copyright or a proof of registration with the “copyright office”. Additionally, copyright laws even on the web vary depending on the country where the material was created or copyrighted. One difference between U.S. laws related to intellectual property and those of many other countries is that those countries give authors “moral rights” that do not exist in American law. For instance authors, even if they have sold their work’s economic rights, might have the right of “integrity,” which prevents alterations of this work for example, colorizing a film http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/4.php
Furthermore, Cohen and Rosenzweig think that the hardest task for historians will be determine the rightful owner of a material in order to ask permission or determine what is “fair use” of another author's intellectual material http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/5.php

Born Digital

Even though most historical materials are still in the process of digitization, many others are not. Some materials are already born digital. This means that some material are already created as digital. There was no process of digitization involved (or very little for picture scanning). Today, after a major event, because of the availability of digital devices and easy access to the internet for the public, people can share with the rest of the web their own pictures, videos, and texts about the event. However, despite this very interesting subjective way of collecting historical material; historians have a lot to worry about in term of authority, veracity of the content, and the preservation of the material.
First, lets look at the problem with authority. On the web or just any other digital material can easily be copied. The same content can be published on the same website but just with a different signature. For instance, in The September Eleven Digital Archive, the website claims that there are over 150,000 digital items and over 40,000 first hand stories. The question is are those 40,000 stories really first hand? I don't think that even people who read and publish all those stories are able to notice two similar stories or even figure to out if those people are who they say they really are.
Second, when it comes to the veracity of the content, stories could easily be made up.
Although the many surveys show that people are less likely to lie when it comes to telling a story about a major historical event, still the possibility are there. A hurricane Katrina story posted on The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank could easily be told by someone who lives on Oregon State and never lived or went to the Gulf Coast. This is one the biggest problem that historians should worry about. There are limited possibilities or none at all when it come to verifying the veracity of personal stories about major historical events.
Third and last, historians should be concerned about the preservation of those “born digital” contents. Just few years back, a floppy disc was if not the only but a prestigious way of digital material. However, today, a floppy disc is literally non existent in the new media market. This case is to show that historians will have the obligation to contently update their methods of storing digital materials. If we look at the digital content Flickr which is a website owned by the giant yahoo. Flickr uses a cloud storage system in order for used to retrieve their material anytime. Still the cloud storage system is not the best way of storing digital materials, it has its disadvantages (see T-Mobile case). Flickr uses other storage methods as well in order to secure the people's digital content. Historians should do the same, have multiple ways of preserving the born digital materials.

Project Proposal

Most people see the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a state educational institution. Many within that those people see it also as a business with investors, a structure, revenues...However, very few see it as a community. Indeed, just like any other community, it has the privilege of having an history. It is true that constituents in the University of Massachusetts Amherst stay for an average period of 4 to 10 years and leave. However, some constituents if not the University itself, have gone through events or moments that we should consider worth sharing with future constituents or just consider preserving for the sake of the community, business or educational institution, depending on how a person sees it.
I did not get this idea until I walked from the elevators to the computer common at the basement of the W.E.B duBois library. By the red Bricks columns, I saw a piece of a news paper article about the first UMass football team. I went on the web and I could not find it, even on the UMass web site. Then, I got this idea of digitizing documents such as that news paper article with the picture the the first UMass football team or the very first class to graduate from the University ( in1868=not sure), the picture is posted by the fine Arts Center, or the first female student to graduate with the class of 1905.
Furthermore, one of the advantages of new media is its accessibility and openness to an unlimited number of people. With this I am assuming that there are people out there who have pieces of UMass history and would be eager to share it. I want in this project to give the opportunity those Alumni, journalists, former professors who have videos, pictures, text documents...upload them or contact us in case they want to share it (However, the content must be validated first before it can be published) and possibly comment on it.

In fact my target group is to be between 17 year olds to 75year olds, who I consider to either be future members of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's community, current students or former members of the UMass community. For the structure, I want the page to be very simple (Google simple) but with a UMass Amherst maroon theme of color. There will be a long search inquiry box; few navigation buttons on top of the page or right below the search inquiry box (home, sports, physical plan,buildings, people, events...)

When it comes to the costs, I really do not know how much time, human resources, and above money will have to be invested for the realization of this digitization project. But in term of limitations, I just don't know how much of what is out there to digitize, how much access I will get to current UMass artifacts (archives) and if their digitization will be allowed.

May God help us!

Digitizing The Past

In this Twenty first century, no one can argue that the use of New Media is already and becoming even more dominant across all scientific fields, and thus history. However, it was not until 1994, four years after the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau that Morris Pierce created the first known to be a historical web site. Since then, prestigious museums, campus universities, towns and cities across the world, societies and companies have been using the New Media as a tool to provide access as well as to promote themselves to the open world. In order to accomplish this, it requires a large amount of material digitizing and archiving.
Nevertheless, digitizing the past has its advantages and disadvantages. Using these examples below, I will illustrate and analyze the benefits and drawbacks of digitizing certain historical materials.

First, I looked at the digitized book "1984” by George Orwell at Google books. One great advantage of digitizing books is that the public can get access to the content at no cost. Instead of stacking books at home, now a USB disc is enough to hold millions of books. And furthermore, a web user can read the reviews about the book first before purchasing or sacrifice time to read it. However, there is not entirety of content. In the case of 1984 and Who Governs (Robert Dahl), there are chapters missing. Google books only provides 2/3 of the book content in order to encourage the reader to purchase the book. For other institutions, you will have to be a member or become a member in order to get access to the full content of the book (or download it).

Second, I looked at the the Open Content Alliance Website. The Open Content Alliance is a non-profit and a collaborative organizational group which helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material for universal access. But when you look at the Open Content Alliance goals from an writer's (author) prospective, that is bad news. Authors should worry about the issue of legitimation and authority. Digitizing books puts the authors' copyright at great risk. A hard copy of any historical material can hardly be copied. However, a digitized version of anything can be duplicated, pirated, illegally stolen, sabotaged and destroyed with just a smileful click of mouse.

Third, I looked at the the Louvre Museum website. Every historical material the museum possesses is pretty much digitized. The material is offered in more than three different languages. This is tremendously advantageous in term of making knowledge available and reaching out to those who cannot afford the cost of a travel. However, the feeling someone gets from contemplating the “Venus de Milo”“or the Taj Mahal cannot simply be digitized. The digital material buries the human and object connection. This will of experiencing historical artifacts first hand vanishes.

Wikipedia

To do a search on the Web, different people use different websites or search engines. However, the results from those different search engines are at a large percentage similar; mainly because of the commonality of the content, popularity among web users, and uniqueness of the word or contents being searched. Among the most popular websites that appear as a result of any search, the Wikis are very omnipresent. The wikis are websites in which any web user can post, edit, cut or delete content on any subject (well, except personal ones).

In this blog post, I will examine the discussion and history tabs of two Wikipidia entries. And Feel the need to you as the reader that I do not give credits to any wikipedia entry unless there is a verifiable source of the entry. Also when i comes to humans (as emotional beings) there is no such thing as objectivity. All entries, posts, editing...are somehow biased.

My first subject was the Federal Reserve System. What I have noticed at first, was that the content on the matter was quite abundant. All the part the content were editable without any demand of membership or log in requirement. Nevertheless, I was warned that the IP address of my computer was going to be recorded.

While analyzing the discussion tab of the Federal Reserve System content, I and other users noticed that the very first paragraph was misleading, the information was inaccurate. Many web users also complained about the large amount of information provided for just that one topic.

When it comes the History tab, the content has been edited over 288 times, and each sub-part of the content has been edited at least 4 times. This article ranked 2686 in traffic on en.wikipedia.org.

The second discussion and history Wikipedia entry that I analyzed was the Knights Templar. In the discussion of the knights Templar, the main topic in the discussion page was the date in which the Knights Templar were burned alive. The main debate was based in the fact that in that time, either the Gregorian calendar or the Julian calendar was used. Consequently, the use or either calendar would change the date of the Poor Knights Templar's persecution. I also noticed an important but debatable missing subject which is the charge of sodomy by the Pope clement the fifth on the Knights Templar. The history of the Knights Templar entry was edited 162 times and based on the statistics, the web-page has so far 526 watchers.

Websites Review

With different abilities, comes different ways of learning. Some people can easily learn by reading a lot books (in a significantly short amount of time). However, others just like myself, rely on sound tracks,(recorded audios), documentaries and movies. Especially with the influence of the New Media, more and more people are learning from a TV screen or Computer monitor more than ever. Just to throw some statistics out there; according to CNN, the average American television viewer is watching more than 151 hours of television per month -- an "all-time". (http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/24/us.video.nielsen/ ) and if we wanna find out the number of hour that the average American spends online; I don't think the number will even close to be accurate.

Nevertheless, here below I will present you a personal review of two historical websites. The opinion expressed in those reviews, are solely personal and are not in any way intended to harm nor to promote the reputation of those websites.

First, as a documentaries fanatic thought that the Public Broadcasting Service web site (www.pbs.org/), was a great historical source for materials such as Primary documents of documentaries, interviews, classical music as well as movies, timeline of events, and a glossary of photos, maps...And its interface is very stimulating in term of pushing the visitor to go further in learning the content of the website. The down side that I have noticed about this web site is the when it comes to books, newspaper articles...The amount of results were very limited or none at all.

Second and finally, I have also visited this historical website called: archive.org/. When it comes to the content, this website is that it has over 150 Billion web pages, close to 2 Million historical text documents, and over a million audio and Video files in its archives. However, in term of functionality, the for every search, you get a load of videos, books, articles, pictures which is good by the way. Only If the programmer could keep them separate or ask the user what kind of document he/she is looking for , that would be better. . In addition to that, while searching into the archives, the user will need to know exactly what he/she is looking for, other wise, the result will not show up. Its interface looks really simple and some how as an archive website ought to be.

Sinclair Allen

Racial Construction

A few minutes ago, In my sociology class of Race, Gender, Class and Ethnicity; We have talked about this concept of Racial Construction. Most importantly, we watched the California Newsreel's Documentary made possible by PBS titled: Race-The Power of an Illusion.

First let me admit that this video was a slap in the face to me. I always thought that the construction of race was entirely biological, that our similarities as well as differences are entirely genetically based. To learn that geography justifies racial construction more than biology which by the way has nothing to do with racial construction was quite a moment in my life. Although, I would admit that I knew about this economical, social and political manipulations of race ideologies in order for some racial groups to gain social, economic and politic power over other racial groups.

I have also found out that the notion of “White race as normative”, also came from the Nazi's SS idea of being the elites. The pure blood. Those born to rule. The race of the future. That is why up until after the fall of Germany and Hitler by the late 1945, many immigrants who came from Northwestern Europe to the US where still considering themselves superior to all other racial groups.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRg_jD7XNws

At the end of the class, a question came up on the screen; “Considering the readings, do you think it 's possible to move beyond racial division?” Here is my personal opinion on the matter and feel free to disagree. It took over 300 years to build this psychological concept of Eugenic and to erase this concept of one racial group being superior to other racial groups in people's minds it is going to take far more than 300 years to reach that point. Here's an example, I did not know the Benedict XVIth and I happen to meet him on the streets and rob his expensive Egyptian cotton hand made gown. When the cops come, even him as a pope will refer me to the cops as Black male first. Reversely, if he happens to be the one who robs my whatever I have, I will refer him to the cops as a white male first. My point is, race is the first thing we notice about people and it is going to be there. Nevertheless, in order to move beyond racial division, we just need to eliminate all the prejudices. We need to consider people's action as individually based and not representing characteristics of a particular racial group.

Please watch this video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhE3Muh3co

Websites Analysis

Just googling the word history gave me over 1,120,000,000 results. when I did the same search a yahoo.com, I got over 4,770,000,000 results. However, it was just a decade and half ago that Morris Pierce (history Ph.D.) created one of the first departmental websites for the University of Rochester. Since then, the number of private, departmental, corporate, and governmental historical web site have blossomed on the web. Every single one of these web sites is different from other in terms structure, content, targeted audience and purpose. In this blog, I will state my personal opinion about three historical web sites which will classified each one of them as: The Good, The Bad or The Ugly.

The Good

Most historical web sites are often limited or just focused on a country, region of the planet, a period of time in history...But I have discovered this web sites which some how impressed me by its global historical content. HyperHistory Online website, has content of primary and secondary documents, and any historical topic, ranging from science, culture, religion, politics, and text books can be found. Moreover, there are subtitles which also range from people, maps, events and history to refine the search. Its also has over 2000 files covering over 3000 years of the world history.

http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html

The Bad

Maybe using the label “The Bad” is quite harsh but I would still go to this web site a collect very valuable and credible historical information on any topic related to the United States of America. The Library of Congress web site is very impressive when it comes to the density of it American history content. I was able to find contains of primary and secondary documents, exhibits, map collections, prints and photographs, sound recordings and motion pictures. However, the bad thing about the Library of Congress web site is that for some topics, you cannot get access to the content immediately. Some documents can be e-mailed to you later, after having provided some personal information of course. Nevertheless, the worst aspect about the Library of Congress is that some searches are just restricted or they give you as little information as possible about the subject of your search.

http://www.loc.gov/index.html

The Ugly

To say: “The Ugly” for an historical web site can be quite harsh as well. Nonetheless, there are really unreliable and uninformative web sites on the web and It takes some knowledge in the field in order to mak e that distinction and to reject the contents of those web sites. One historical web site that most scholars do not give credits to is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a historical web site in which anyone can post their entries, regardless of his/her knowledge or of the veracity of their entries. Most false information in wikipedia can be found in dates, occurrence of events, and biased facts (which are often the result of the person's belief, religion, culture or person convictions).

www.wikipedia.org/

Sinclair Allen

Sunday, January 25, 2010

Scavenger Hunt

Most people, even highly educated ones believe that an article, a picture, a video or anything can be found just by typing it in the search box of one of the major web search engine. This is not entirely true, for the simple fact that a web search depends first; on the type of the search engine that particular website uses. There are two types of search engines. In one hand, there are the individual search engines which compile their own searchable databases on the web. On the other hand, there are the metasearchers, which do not compile databases. Metasearchers search engines do not crawl the web. search the databases of multiple sets of individual search engines simultaneously. Second, a web search depends also on the rarity of the word, picture, videos, person...For example, finding a Nancy Pelosi's letter can be much harder to find on the web than a Barack Obama letter. Third and most importantly, the techniques that the person uses to do the search. In order to locate and retrieve a piece of information on the web, a strategy is often needed. For instance, knowing the website to go to in order to get the information, the specificity of the query, sign, mark or symbol.

Here are some examples of Web-searches and the methods used to find them.

1. Find a website that Host the photographs of Eleanor Roosevelt, George Pompidou, Adi Amin Dada, and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Method of search: Go to google main page, then click on image and then image advanced search. And just type all the names in the search box. The picture was found in the website hereby www.titoville.com/voditelji.html

2. Find a poem about the first world war that contains the line: The Kestrel hovering by day.

Method of search: First go to google main page and then just type The Kestrel hovering by day into quotes. The line will be found in this website: http://www.bartleby.com/266/82.html

3. Find an image of a banner of from the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts that reads: “Shall a Republic which Could not Bear the Bonds of a king, Cradle a Bondage Which a King Abolished.”

Method of search: Just the type the entire quoted query. The best result will show in the Massachusetts Historical Society Website. http://www.masshist.org/database/onview.cfm?display=print&queryID=1730

4. A letter from George Washington to Timothy Pikering in which Washington complains about “certain forged letters” intended to wound his character and “deceive the people.”

Method of search: Google main page, then type George Washington correspondences in the search box. Finally search by key word within the website by typing Timothy Pickering and certain forged letters.

Scavenger Hunt

Sinclair Allen

History 493/Digital History

Dr. Jon B. Olsen