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?

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?

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”?

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

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!

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)

-         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?

- 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?

“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?

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??

The New School’s Memory group (a group of grad students mostly in psychology and sociology) has weekly seminars and I heard one of their presenters (Kimberly Spring) speak about her research last spring and I thought you might want to get in touch w/ her. Her work is primarily focused on photography but I remember her briefly mentioning blogs as well. Here is the info I have… The seminars meet during our class on Wednesday but you could probably email her… here is the email for the group (who would probably give you her email): nssrmemoryconference@gmail.com

Here’s the info on her seminar lecture:

October 7:
-Kimberly Spring (Sociology, New School for Social Research) will present a paper titled “Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator: The Role of Photographs in U.S.
Service Members’ Testimony Against War”
Abstract:

Since Mathew Brady first documented the life and death of soldiers in
the U.S. Civil War, photographs have become central to the collective
memory of war. However, whereas the visual recording of war has
traditionally been the purview of journalists, today the images of war
are increasingly presented through the lenses of those most directly
involved – military service members – to the extent that the photographs
taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison have arguably had a greater
influence on the collective memory of the Iraq War than any other image.
This paper examines how some U.S. veterans of the Iraq War have
integrated this practice of taking pictures into a critique of the
military. The analysis considers how the veterans attempt to fix the
meaning of photographs through the problematization of their use in the
military; how the photographs serve as a mechanism for remembering; and
the ways in which the images, as analogons of reality, bring the past
into the present. Utilizing Roland Barthes’ concept of a photograph’s
“third meaning,” I examine how the presentation of the photographs
reveals the disguised meaning in these types of images, which lies in
the human capacity to find triumph in the suffering and subordination of
others, in order to affect social transformation.

In introducing his 4 points on collaboration Rosenzweig provides a little anecdote: Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks, and he replied, “That’s where the money is.” Similarly, one could answer the question of why historians should work with museums and libraries by saying “that’s where the past is.”

 This may be a bit of a response to one of the earlier questions (Why are we working on our projects individually?) but aren’t we, by working with multiple organizations and collecting documents from multiple sources, working collaboratively? Our projects may not be collaborative with others in the class but for most of us it seems like most of us will be working with some museums, archives and librarians just to get our materials.

My question is, if we consider the work of gathering these archival projects as collaborative in some way, how should we credit and recognize the shared work done by those who kept the materials we want to use? Should we, the bank robbers, credit the banks in some way further than acknowledgements and citations? Or maybe a better question is how can we work to not just “rob the banks” but to copy the material and maybe give back to the banks in some way with lesson plans and exhibits which highlight material from their collections?

I’m really intrigued by an article I just read: Protest, Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the
Peace Movement Post 9/11

Help me if you have any suggestions or ideas!!!

“Where ever the printing press took hold, conflict seemed to follow. Shlain argues that the introduction of printed books seems to have triggered a kind of mass social pathology that may have stemmed from the jarring introduction of the linear, left brained communications mode of thought into what had previously been a predominantly oral and visual right brained culture. L. Shlain believes this cognitive disruption explains why printing and literacy seem to have spread in almost perfect lockstep with the rise of witch burning. ” -120

and then further: “The sudden shift from an oral, visually symbolic culture to an increasingly left-brained world of linear written texts may have triggered a deep shift in the European psyche that led, for a time, to a kind of mass psychosis.” 121

Freud defined a traumatic neurosis as evidenced by a “weakening and shattering of the mental functions,” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) and in Trauma literature there is often discussion of the traumatic events as causing a breach with or a fragmentation of one’s way of narrativizing and thinking. There is often mention that when a trauma occurs we are forced to question the very ways we have previously understood the world. A victim of trauma is sometimes described as being “unhinged” from his or her paradigm of how the world works. Wright’s quote seems to echo this violence against the mind; in transitioning out of a visual culture into a literate one (where “page numbers appeared, while illustrations dwindled” – 121) was one’s understanding of the world really shifted to the extreme that we could call this a cultural trauma?

following this line of thought, I am struck then by Levy’s discussion of ways of thinking and the distracting qualities of new technologies like the internet…

Are we in a new “traumatic era” where our now linear brains, which are the result of the previously mentioned visual-to-literate transition, are being retraumatized by the new ways we are forced to think in terms of hyperlinks, connections, cyclical natures, crossreferences, googleimages, googlevideos, googlebooks, endless blogs and shared authority where, As Levy suggests, “New technologies do make it remarkably efficient and easy to search for information and to collect masses of potentially relevant sources on a huge variety of topics, they can’t in and of themselves, clear the space and time needed to absorb and to reflect on what is being collected.”-244 ???

(what does it say that while writing this question I have four other tabs open: one figuring out if it is “breach from” or “breach with;” one with email; one searching (with not avail) for a performance artist who I recall last year created a piece about constant distraction and one with refworks open hoping that last fall I saved an article I remember thinking “I should save this somewhere” about said performance piece… again to no avail)
oh and my del.icio.us name is also meredith505dav

I’m also interested in the comment Rosenzweig makes in reference to computers and the internet as sites of Foucauldian power struggles. On the Wiki history of the internet site it cites a table by the UTI which illustrates the percentage of internet users across developed counties vs. developing countries. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Internet_users_per_100_inhabitants_1997-2007_ITU.png

What interests me here is the issue of accessibility to knowledge and ways of thinking.

Friedman’s example of the 1990’s Tetris commercial suggests that playing computer games (and perhaps accessing information though computers in general) continues to shape how one thinks and see the world even after walking away from the computer. He notes specifically that “The [Tetris] commercial captured the most remarkable quality of interactive software: the way it seems to restructure perception, so that even after you’ve stopped playing, you continue to look at the world a little differently.” 124

What implications does this effect have when the systems, computers, internet etc which are shaping the way we see the world around us are being accessed by specific social and economic classes?

I’ve worked very minimally with HTML editing, played for about 30 seconds with Dreamweaver, and  read a few blogs but I often feel a step behind technological trends… I am familiar with many of the social networking sites but mostly in a surface level way. I’m looking forward to really diving into the material it looks like we are covering!

My focus within my program has shifted significantly over the last year and I’m working towards a thesis on the evolution of collective memory around national events like Septemeber 11th and the influence of the state and the media in this process. I’m hoping to work my project around some aspect of this for our class…

I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!