Creating Digital History » John Bence

Discussion Quest?on

John Bence — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:58:23 +0000

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.

Tech Question

John Bence — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:54:45 +0000

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.

11/18 Discussion

John Bence — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:53:25 +0000

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 Does it make sense to copy out-dated materials in the same format and somehow maintain outdated technologies?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?

Project

John Bence — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:08:49 +0000

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.

Tech Question.

John Bence — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:59:49 +0000

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?

Tech Question.

John Bence — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:48:46 +0000

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.

Tech/Discussion Question

John Bence — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:07:01 +0000

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.

Discussion 10/21

John Bence — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:50:25 +0000

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.

Discussion Question 10/14

John Bence — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:57:20 +0000

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.

Discussion 10/7

John Bence — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:00:25 +0000

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.

Discussion Question 9/30

John Bence — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:39:12 +0000

My question relates to how “collaboration” is being defined. If scholars in humanities collaborate, it is to produce something like an article or a digital project. And, judging by the articles by Spiro and Rosenzweig, scholars need to collaborate more when it comes to the humanities and creating digital projects. Yet, I wonder if the previous model of humanities scholarship was not just an archaic form of collaboration. Articles by singular authors are never published in a vacuum and most go on to be read, reviewed, cited, lauded, rejected, or otherwise.

Certainly, the previous model of scholarship connotes detached and isolated scholars. By actively “collaborating” they can shed this connotation, but I can’t help but wonder if it is any different. Writing an article and publishing it is the same as proposing an idea at a collaborative meeting. And having it peer-reviewed is then just like receiving feedback for your idea a the same meeting.

Are the humanities are moving away from producing ideas to be considered at large and moving more towards producing tangible, consumable things like articles and websites? Is that good or bad?

Research Topic… maybe more like Research Trajectories.

John Bence — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:29:19 +0000

My past interests have been American Expansionism, American Empire, Manifest Destiny and the like. I am extremely interested in the more outlandish forms of expansion, from our instigation of a war with Mexico and seizure of almost half of its land in the 1840s, to lesser attempts to conquer Cuba to add slave states to the union, and Cornelius Vanderbilt supporting an American “filibuster” to become President of Nicaragua so that he may have control over the only Pre-Canal route across Central America.

Most of these stories have roots in NYC, since Cornelius Vanderbilt was here at the time. Fundraisers and rallies were held in New York for the benefit of the efforts to take Cuba, but archival material seems to be scarce and newspapers are the typical source for this information. I may need to refocus my research attempts. Perhaps a more contemporary topic would be appropriate in order to increase the possibility of findin visual materials as opposed to textual documents.

I’m also interested in my home state and the relationship it has with New York and the city itself. I began recently looking for materials relate to Vermont as a getaway destination for wealthy New Yorkers and whether there is significant/interesting material on how this tourist industry grew.

Discussion Questions – Rosenzweig

John Bence — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:41:50 +0000

My thoughts come from the “Scarcity or Abundance” problems that Rosenzweig discusses. Archiving all digital material as a “grass-roots/enthusiast” response to these problems in contrast to the Pitt Project’s selective methodology seems to be cumbersome. Rosenzweig seems to admit yet not flesh out the idea that archives and historical scholarship are the result of hundreds of years of trial and error. The idea that somehow we will be able to within a generation draft and implement an effective way to archive digital material seems a little far fetched. I think the wealth of scholarship on the subject of what the internet’s role in culture is a testament to the fact we still don’t know what we are dealing with, let alone able to document it for future generations. His phrase “futures of the past” really inspired this curmudgeonly post, because it seemed idealistic and romantic.

Also, I lost all my Zotero research because I didn’t fully understand how the internet-browser-based plug-in didn’t save any information to the internet… my bad.

delicious = johndbence

Discussion Questions

John Bence — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:45:49 +0000

I found particularly interesting the idea of progression and the inevitable post-internet utopia. Introduced to it in detail by Friedman and given a historical snapshot of this kind of thinking by Bush, the utopian aspects of the expansion of technological capacity seem to be central to the scholarship of this kind. Speaking generally, it is interesting to think that many advances in human history improved our general condition in the world but did not result in the creation of a utopia. I also like to think that humans are too imperfect for perfect world and that any advances we make, whether it domesticating plants or developing the internet, will never be enough to stop our most basic, inherent instincts. This may be more of a criticism of the idea of utopia than anything else, but it still feels relevant to ask why we (as humans) are so good at imagining the (so far) unattainable.

Hello

John Bence — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:27:33 +0000

Hello!

My name is John Bence and I just started the Archives and Public History program this semester. I got my BA in History from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. I moved to New York last week having spent a year in DC. I am originally from Vermont.

While doing my undergrad, I worked as a archival assistant in both the school’s archive and in a special, sociological archive. I have little technical experience so I jumped at the chance to register for this class. I am interested generally in intellectual and social history of the postbellum and progressive eras.