I was most interested in Shirkey’s amatuerization of professions. And particularly interested in how this relates to history and Wikipedia. It seems the main issue we are facing here is the democratization of everything, which is precisely what has been touted as the benefit of the internet. I wonder if by creating standards and forums through which people can contribute to more scholarly websites, as talked about in Museum 2.0 article, we are creating a stratified virtual space that undemocratic in nature. I guess my main point is that for the institutions to effectively interact on the web, the process of democratization must be hindered in order to preserve an institution’s agency. Make sense? at all? I’m not sure it does, I just wonder if the structures we create online for access and participation are really smoke and mirrors assuming the main purpose of using the internet in the humanities is too connect with the public. Where people might have criticized museums and other cultural institutions in the late nineteenth century as forms of social control, what about the internet is remarkably different. I guess this is some attempt at a Marxist interpretation which I have no background in, so forgive me.

Has anyone tried to use OCR software in the Digital Studio yet? I have color images of my book pages and I wanted to know how to convert them to black and white and make them a more simple PDF and not huge JPEGs.

I am also wondering what other people are doing in terms of the background history to their specific topics. Should I include a general overview of the US and Mexico up until the war? Maybe I should talk about the war’s legacy. How much effort should I put in to expand the information on the site in order to attract people to engage my site.

I was most baffled by the issues of preserving not only different formats of materials but also the technology needed to access these materials. Does it make sense to copy out-dated materials in the same format and somehow maintain outdated technologies? Would this somehow get around issues of reformatting that “take away” from the experience?

http://johndbence.org/kendall/

This site is created from the book The War between the United States and Mexico, Illustrated by George Wilkins Kendall, a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune.  His book not only included descriptions of each battle but also included a dozen large, high quality lithographs by Carl Nebel. It was published in 1851.

I just tried to move all of my “project” files from johndbence.org/kendall into the parent directory so that it would just be johndbence.org. However, since I already added files and insalled omeka, it made all the links reference the previous hierarchy and didn’t change when i moved it. Is there a way to do this without having to change the code?

Has anyone tried the Dropbox plugin? It says it was designed for Omeka 1.0 and it does in fact seem a little off to me, it automatically creates an item with the file name as opposed to a name I give it. Just wondering if this is just me or if anyone has tried to batch-add and run into problems.

The Geolocation plugin on Omeka is working fine for me, but isn’t there a more complicated way of doing this? GIS I believe it’s called. How do we do that? Also, excited to see that some new plugins became available for Omeka. 1.1, like the CoolIris extension.

I have no real technical questions yet, Amanda answered them the other day and helped me install Omeka. I am extremely interested in what Nicole M. just asked about costs, how is that calculated.  It also seems to me that digitization should be, first and foremost, a method to provide access as opposed to a preservation method. Something has to be in pretty bad shape if a digital copy seems to be the best way to preserve it. Therefore, I find it interesting that places like NYU have whole preservation departments that are not focused on providing sensible access but rather tech-driven preservation.

I wanted to say something about the “billboard at 60 mph” idea and our idealized expectations for a scholarly website. It seems that it might be a good idea to have two layers for our websites, and that anyone looking for more in depth information can find it if they spend more than 20 seconds for it. Is it ok to put visuals upfront for ease of use, even though they have been decontextualized? If our interpretation and substantive information isn’t immediately obvious to the viewer, is that somehow dropping the ball on our obligations to present our historical material responsibly to the public.

My question regards the Interchange article. I wonder why, or maybe rather, what the effects are of the types of digital history this article discusses. We recognize new media tools as excellent for expanding the interactive and visual features of teaching history and enriching scholarship. But why must the internet only be a tool to go beyond what we already do. My final project for this class *was* going to be the presentation and interpretation of a rare book that was used an account of the Mexican-American War. I would be still using it for that today, although the new media would allow me expand on this function.  At one point, they discuss the fluidity and everchanging aspect of digital history. I wonder if we as scholars could come up with standards in order to overcome the obstacle of internet fluidity and somehow come up with ways to mimick the function of publishers pre-new media.

All the readings this weeks seemed to be on the same continuum of “freer is better”. And it felt as if the culmination of this opinion was expressed best (and most radically) by Lessig. Is there a case to be made for revamping copyright law so that it works better and services large, monied interests less while not completely throwing out the precedents we have set for past few hundred years? And again, I always how the advent of the digital age really changes things, as opposed to, perhaps, just changing the speed of things.