When Shirky discusses the “Pro-ana” websites and their “self help” characteristics he notes that these types of sites are a product of the ability to gather easily on the internet in the first place. He states, “The gathering of pro-ana girls isn’t a side effect of our social tools; it’s an effect of those tools.” 207

He ends this same chapter by noting that self help groups are founded on the criteria of affirmation and support of group members (which is what he suggests is exactly what pro-anorexic sites do).

Using this example, what kinds of social responsibility do people have to combat groups like this? If groups which are unhealthy simply move to another site, (i.e. Seventeen taking down their comment board once pro-anorexic young women began using it as a meet up point) what other actions can and should we do as communities whose daughters/sisters/friends might be participating in these communities?

Secondly, I’m really interested in Shirky’s point that the internet opens the opportunity to be creative because the “cost of failure” is so low. I’m wondering what people think about this point in conjunction with our own projects. Since we jumped right into using free software and were given a very open ended opportunity to “Build an online archive and exhibit of primary sources” what are some of the advantages and disadvantages we have faced with the “try it and then if it doesn’t work try something else” approach to digital projects? Although I like Shirky’s idea on pg 249 that “In a world were anyone can try anything, even risky stuff can be tried eventually. If a large enough population of users is trying things, then the happy accidents have a much higher chance of being discovered,” I have to wonder… What about planning? What about proposals? What about thinking things through before jumping in head first?

Brigid actually answered my question which was a reiteration of the question how do we get people to our site first instead of navigating through the index page… so I’ll skip that question.

I agree with Julianna that after the readings I am worrying about the “fun” level of my project.  Most of my documents are lengthy written works (a deposition/ 2 summaries from trials / typed letters and news clippings) I have a few photos that I’m still confirming copyright with and I have an oral history snippet, but especially after reading Nielsen et. al piece I’m reevaluating how to write about these documents so that visitors are able to “scan pages; [and] not read word-by-word.” What do people suggest, from their experience so far with their own projects, about how to balance explanation and documents? I’m finding that the 2 object pages with more text seems more comfortable to me as the author of the exhibits but worry that these pages are too “boring” for scanning visitors.

Finally, in response to Ashley’s questions,  could we talk about how we could start using our sites to “build communities” or at least foster opportunities for communities to form? (John mentioned he has figured out the 2.0 plugins that let visitors post our sites to Twitter/facebook… This reminded me of the interactivity in the Brooklyn Museum’s Graffitti exhibit reading. What community building opportunites could we create?

Schreibman  makes a pretty interesting assertion when she states, “We will not be able in the future to rely on traditional assessments of value for determining what deserves preservation. In the digital realm, there will be no uniqueness, no scarcity, no category of “rare.”” I’m wondering what other people think about this statement.

Personally I keep thinking that this statement assumes that “everything” will make it onto a collective digital form; but as we have clearly seen this semester, what gets digitized, how it gets digitized, and where the digital formats are located once they do exist, are all obstacles to this utopian “non-scarcity through accessibility.” What do people make of this statement? In the future what will be “the unique” or the “rare object”?

For public documents (my example is the scoring breakdown of the 1977 physical portion of the New York City Fire Department Entrance Examination), should the publisher be the archive from which I pulled the document, or the governmental agency which created it? (i.e. do I say City of New York/ New York City Fire Department / or Robert F Wagner Labor Archives)

Also, I too am curious about how much information we should provide in the description area. Should we reserve interpretation of the documents for the exhibit pages or should we be putting in contextual explanations in this “description” area?

here is the link to my cite (I am making the documents public for the duration of the class period but then need to make them private again for now as I have not confirmed which documents Brenda is comfortable with me putting up publicly.)

http://www.digitalmeredith.com/digitalhistoryproject

This isn’t actually my discussion question for this week, but I stumbled across this article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed which was posted yesterday and it seems to completely 100% contradict the enthusiasm for social networking tools and technology that many of our readings have expressed.

If people have time I would love to hear what you think of this article… it feels like he is completely denouncing courses like our current Digital History class… I just want to throw it out there because it seemed sooo contradictory to everything we have been reading / discussing.

http://chronicle.com/article/dfs/49078/

Thanks!

After watching Wesch’s youtube video I clicked onto the “a vision of today’s students” video next to it.  Both videos stress is a kind of crowd sourcing mentality and the variety of sources available to students (i.e. students aren’t looking solely in textbooks for information). I was really struck by one student who’s page said “I will read 8 books this year, 2300 webpages and 1281 facebook profiles.” all of that reading, and presumable commenting on pages, creates a huge source of new user-created information.

My question this week is how are we going to incorperate this “we will edit the web” group-power mentality? I think someone else mentioned this question early and I’m also wondering about the ability to allow people to create their own tags.  Is this an option in Omeka? (I couldn’t find it when I was looking early today)

Also, as a side question, does anyone know if Omeka has a timeline plugin? (I’m trying to figure out a way to link objects in a chronological way)

I have 2 questions this week (both are semi-tech related)

-         Both the Cohen & Rosenzweig and Deegan & Tanner articles this week discuss the importance of meta data and marking up documents. I was struck by one comment in the Cohen/Rosenzweig section where they quote Michael Lesk as saying, “Doing things really well makes them too expensive for many institutions…[I] favor providing more material at lower costs even if it means lower quality.^” I’ve been thinking about this in terms of our projects; should we be more concerned with getting breadth in our topics or in getting really high quality and detailed images and highly marked up documents in a smaller quantity? I’m just wondering how people are approaching the quality vs. quantity issue with our semester time constraints.

-         (related to the above question) The photographs I have so far for my project are from contacts I’ve made with flickr users. These images aren’t really high quality DPI. For our projects is it important to have the high resolution photos? Should I try to get the people I’ve contacted to send me higher res copies directly?

I have a grouping of smaller questions this week:

- Krug reinforces the value of “testing” websites. Should we arrange to partner up and test each others archives at some point?

- In their accessibility section, Rozenzweig & Cohen suggest shutting off image loading in the browser so you can see what text a blind person would receive through page reading software. This is an interesting point that I hadn’t really thought about before… How should we incorporate this idea into our projects? Does the Alt function for images fulfill the task of making pages accessible to people with disabilities in sites which are heavily image based? (This seems insufficient in my opinion)

- Along the same line, and this may be a question of not using Omeka yet, but does Omeka have a field for entering “alt” data for our scanned images? Or do we need to code this in ourselves?

- Finally, Rosenzweig & Cohen reiterate that good websites are clear in their structure presenting appropriately-named directories and files. Krug also stresses naming appropriately for keywords and scanning, (he even goes as far as suggesting that people read websites with about as much depth as they read highway billboards… “If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.”)

How are people organizing their archives so that there is a clear lineage of directories, while still ensuring that visitors can scan though to get to appropriate materials without clicking 45 hyperlinks?

I’m struck by a comment made by William Thomas III in the Interchange article.

“The most difficult aspect of teaching digital history is getting beyond the technology to a point where students consider what their readers/users will do with the material in the project. Students discover that fitting the technology to the content is not a simple process of digital conversion. I find myself coming back to this question again and again: What will your reader/user do?”

This comment seemed to reflect the unexpected adoption of Zotero by Epicuious readers for recipe cataloguing and storing. These two ideas together leave me wondering what is the value of just “putting things up on the web” versus providing tools like lesson plans or calls to action. How do we strike a balance in digital projects between providing structure and real world usability and still allowing the audience/users to adapt and change the usage of said projects for their own needs?

On a side note, I was interested in the large scale demographic representations Cohen illustrated in his lecture (CNN watchers and Fox news watchers versus those who mentioned praying on 9/11). One thing he said really got to me; he mentioned that the  Columbia oral history project which interviewed a few hundred people is “better” than the 9/11 library of congress archive but that the large quantity of data in the library of congress 9/11 archive provides a contrasting tool for broader sampling research. Is this broad scale glut related research really just reductive statistics? What purpose does this superficial level breakdown really serve?

I’m interested in a few comments that seem to go together from this weeks readings:

Rosenzweig’s article states, “A study in computer science finds that online articles are cited more than four times as often as offline articles.”

And, Lessig states in his lecture that in 2002 music sales, “5 times the amount of CDs  sold were traded illegally on the internet but with only a 5% total loss in sales…”

And, Vaidhyanathan cites Richard Stallman’s statement, “I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making eacg user agree not to share with others. I refurse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software liscene agreement.”

These three statements all seem to suggest that “freeing,” using, and sharing of copy written information happens once it hits the internet.

I suppose  my question this week is more of a reiteration of Lessig’s question in his lecture: “what have you done?” if information is going to be shared in vastly greater quantities once it is available digitally via the internet, what can we do to make information usable without the fear that some monopolizing company (like Disney) is going to come sue you??