In regard to the “Search engine optimization guide” when they are speaking about clear and useful URLs, omeka is allowing us to do that already right? like in the exhibits with the slugs?

If I want to change the URL of the main page to something more descriptive (in the hopes that it is more easily searched for) like brigidharmon.com/lutheran_cemetery, do I just rename the file ‘project’ to ‘lutheran_cemetery’ on the server side of filezilla?

Also in regard to our own archives, what steps should we be taking, in these weeks of creation, to try and ensure any small amount of preservation for the future?

This archive documents items related to the Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. The photos, articles, etc focus on the history and presentation of the cemetery as a part of the rural cemetery movement of the mid 19th century as well as its place in the history of the General Slocum Steamboat disaster of 1904

At the same time the web has also given birth to a set of sites that aspire to provide everything or almost everything on a particular topic—primary sources, interpretive commentary, teaching materials, and discussion. Such a topical approach does not have obvious counterparts in the analog world where historical work is more clearly defined by relatively discrete audiences—researchers, scholars, students, or museum-goers, for example.

Hypertext is obviously an amazing and efficient tool particularly within subjects such as history where nothing stands alone; any person, event, place or historical theory is related to a host of other ideas. My question is can there be too much of this? Even while reading that chapter, anytime I came to an interesting project, I would look at it, and inevitably while on that site I would link to something else that looked interesting. Before you know it, it was 10 minutes later, I had 5 tabs open and I had totally forgotten what was originally being discussed in the chapter. We all do it, the always fun and wonderful waster of time, the wikipedia spiral, when you start on one page about Lincoln and end up reading about small island nations in the south Pacific.

While analogue presentations like history monographs certainly lack the dynamic and interactive qualities of web presentations, I wonder though, if we maybe get a more focused and longer lasting knowledge from books? Are there ways to keep the focus of your audience at a history website, when new information is only one click away. Perhaps separating the pages with links from the pages with focused content? or when writing interpretation, having the links/ footnotes or outside related sites at the end of the written section, so as not to distract during reading? But perhaps old habits die hard for me and the new generations of history students can focus and retain even with the hundreds of options presented to them simultaneously.

Anderson say in “The Long Tail” that we ( collectively everyone on earth?, businesses? people trying to sell movies and music?) need to embrace niches.  In my mind it seems like a call to look outside the box, or at least to look both inside and outside the box, mainstream movies AND the small lesser  known ones. I have been thinking about this idea in regards to historical presentations. New York has so many historical institutions who present exhibits, yet in some ways I feel like they cover the same topics over and over.. does NY really need to have another presentation about the Dutch in NY, or Coney Island or any of the other ‘Hot’ topics which get presented often. What about the smaller quirkier topics? Are they not done at large arenas because they will not bring in the crowds or because the research into these types of topics needs to be more exhaustive, and time consuming? Is the web the place for the ‘indie rock’ topics of history?

On a related note, an issue I have come across in thinking about my own final project for this class. I wish to work on one of these smaller topics but have been encountering less than scholarly and less than an abundance of information. We can not really do the type of in-depth primary source original research that might go into writing a book or an article about a topic in the time that we have, or is that what the project entails? I like the idea of doing my own unique research but worry that perhaps it will not yield the necessary components that a project like this requires.

My second question relates to another part of the Rosenzweig article. In discussing the rise of email he says that its rise and the rise of newsgroups was influenced by a “growing informality of communication” This phrase struck me. I wonder if the internet and digtial media is the way to create an informality of history. Most people, I think would say they enjoy history, but historical books often written with the most respected  reserach by trained historians/ professors are not flying off the shelves. Most people in mainstream culture are more likely to view a webpage than pick up a university press history book, or even an historical non-fiction book written by say a journalist. Is the presentation of history on the internet the best way to present history to the masses? And in what ways can we, who wish to create this access to history, make the presentation informal, while interesting and informative without being vague, too simple or superficial?