I know that John was wondering about this as well, but is there any way to set up a “home page” for our domain name? For example, when I type in somonjeau.net, can I make it s my Omeka site begins there, rather than at somonjeau.net/project?

The readings this week made me a tad nervous about my own project, since nearly all of it would require the audience to read articles relating to the kosher meat riots. I’m trying my best to find supplemental photos to depict street life in the Lower East Side, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful. I think the fact that my project is so wordy is forcing me to find ways to make my website seem more “fun.” If I can get the Google map application to work, it might make my project more interactive.

More than anything, the readings this week got me thinking about the lack of cooperation between the developers of electronic media. Not only do competing companies put out hardware/software that are in no way compatible with the products of other companies, but some media (even produced by the same company) cannot be used in different parts of the world (i.e. EU and US CDs and DVDs). Perhaps, given the overwhelming rate at which our culture is being represented digitally, it would be worthwhile for some sort of international standard by which ALL makers of digital media must adhere. Of course, given the way copyright laws are these days and the stigma against users making copies of digital media they’ve purchased, this seems impossible for the forseeable future. It’s a bit discouraging when one realizes that an archive may have to make the choice to preserve every reincarnation of hardware/software in order to display digital media for the short time span between upgrades or simply forgo digital media alltogether.

http://www.somonjeau.net/project

My project is a group of images, mostly newspaper articles with a few supplementary photographs to establish geographical/social background, documenting the 1902 kosher meat boycott by Jewish housewives on the Lower East Side.

Between May 15th-June 5th, 1902, following the failed attempt of kosher butchers to combat the raise in price of meat from 12 to 18 cents/lb., thousands of Jewish women, most of them housewives, took to the streets of the Lower East Side of New York and violently boycotted kosher butcher shops. The boycott quickly spread to Brooklyn and other northeastern cities and received considerable attention both within the Jewish community and in larger urban society. Given that these Jewish women were not a unionized group, very little documentation of the event remains outside of descriptions of the event published in local newspapers.

This is more of a suggestion for other students, but I recently installed the geolocation plug-in, which allows you to input locations on an interactive google map which you can use to show important locations associated with your particular document. Aside form a weird formatting error (the fields for inputting more than on address seem to be hidden behind the map…but this may just be a problem with my computer/browser), this seems like a plug-in which may be of a use to a few peoples projects.

I’ve been trying to change the background color on the Default (Thanks, Roy) theme, but I’m not quite sure which field I should be replacing for the background. So far I’ve change nearly every other color. Any suggestions on where it might be or what it might be labeled as?

Is there any way for me to designate what is shown in the thumbnail version of my image? I’m using newspaper articles and the uploaded image only shows the blurred lines of text. I think it would be helpful if I could somehow have the headline appear as the image thumbnail.

I’ve also had trouble formatting the image in Paint.net so that it will be large enough to read. Might it be a better strategy to print out the articles from their PDF form and re-scan them myself?

I’ve been going over the screencasts for Omeka and when I get to the step where I should be writing in my url, I am not given the option to begin to install Omeka. Instead I’m shown a screen that says: Index of /, etc.

Am I missing something? Is there something else I should be doing on mysql?

I find it difficult to reconcile Krug’s idea of thoughtless web searching with the fact that we are putting up mini-web archives for academic purposes. Obviously with our format it is not optimal that users skim through our content. The fact that I will be using digitized newspaper articles doesn’t make me exactly optimistic about people spending time on the site.

Now for the technical question: Will we have the ability to override the Omeka template with some HTML overrides?

While cliometric studies seem “iffy” in written histories, it seems incredibly useful and evocative when applied to historical websites. Jefferson’s Travels is a perfect example of this. I think historians often overlook the importance of illustrating history through visuals. While it seems a waste of time to name every book in Jefferson’s library or listing his outgoing and incoming mail over the span of a year, providing visual representations of these areas of Jefferson’s life add to the overall image of him as historical figure.

While cliometrics is helpful when used to add to historical description of a person or event, when left without context (example: IBM’s Many Eyes) this information can be easily exploited. While a “wordle” showing the words most used in a presidential speech may be visually appealing , it is folly to try to extract any meaning out of this kind of visualization.

How might digital archives use similar cliometric images to add to their websites? What kind of information about an archive might be worth turning into a visual representation?

We’ve been discussing the function of the archivist in the shaping of history, which makes me wonder how the copyright issue, and its massive escalation in the past decade, is taking this power away from archivists.

Will the withholding of documents, both published and unpublished and even after the death of the author, be detrimental to the study of our era in the future? Are these authors who are extremely protective of their “intellectual property” doing themselves a disservice, and could this possibly be helpful to those organizations who work outside of the box and promote “free culture”? Or, do we simply assume that because an author or company spends the money and time to preserve a work that it is worth the price?

The readings this week rave about the importance of academic collaboration while none of them offer clues on how an “academic” is to work collaboratively.

Collaborative work is almost necessary for scientists, but is it really necessary for the humanities? It seems that one benefit of collaboration would be the ability for a group of academic researchers to amass more information on a given topic, but is it possible for this same group of researches to come to a single conclusion about the information they amass? Are we ideologically overlooking the prominence of the scholarly ego?

Perhaps I’m settling into the curmudgeonly and individualistic ways of scholars, but it seems to me that scholars already learn from the process of disagreement. Most works are inspired by the author’s disagreement over the thesis of another scholar. If we put too much focus on collaboration, will we miss the opportunity to fill in “holes” in academic study as we have with more individual driven studies?

I think I would be less skeptical if I knew how humanities scholars were able to collaborate on a single essay or an entire book. (Did they conference electronically or in person? Were they assigned to specific areas of focus? Did one person put the study into words or was each sentence come to by consensus? Is it important that scholars come from the same field and same interests, or did they benefit from their differences?)