The posts over at Prof Hacker on creating a checklist for the semester and organizing teaching material got me thinking about my process of preparing for the semester, organizing and archiving my material, and keeping my sanity.  So, consider this post a ProfHacker / Lifehacker-esque contribution.

My Semester Checklist

1. Purchase binders and label them for each course.  I do this for both my TA positions and my seminar classes.  These binders collect everything related to my assistantship: syllabus, printed course readings, grading and exam resources, exam questions, notes, and anything else I find useful for organizing and archiving.  Much of this will be digitized at the end of the semester, but I find it useful to keep the physical archive in one place.
2. Create computer directories for the course.  I create a folder for each semester (Fall 2010, Spring 2009, etc.) and within each of these are folders for each course.  Within each course folder I have another series of folders to organize possible course resources: “Assignments,” “Clips,” “Notes,” “PDF,” and “Syllabus.”
3. Clean and organize my office.  For this semester, this shouldn’t be a big issue for me because as a research assistant I did not have an office on campus.  I tend to keep my office neat because I don’t want to be distracted by looking for stuff.  I keep my supplies organize, book straight, and computer desktop clean.
4. Related, stock up on office supplies: stapler, legal pads, pens and pencils, scissors, tape, binder clips, paper clips, and personal items.
5. Also related, I clean and organize my messenger bag.  At the end of the semester I purge my back of unnecessary items.  Papers, folders, and books are either trashed, filed, archived, or recycled.  Items always include are: Macbook Pro, computer power cord, phone charger, pens and pencils, highlighter, Sharpie, small stapler, Moleskin, granola bar, umbrella, legal pad, USB flash drive, mints, cologne, office keys, aspirin, gum, office keys, hand sanitizer, and facial tissue.
6. Add important academic dates to my calendar.  I use iCal / Google Calendar to keep track of scheduled happenings in my life.  In addition to important dates, I also add the blocks of time when classes are so I always know when I’m free or busy.
7. Let the professor know my office number and office hours.  Usually listed on the syllabus, I try and know this as soon as I can so my professor doesn’t have to give it any thought.
8. Heather Whitney writes of plugging holes from summer research.  This isn’t something I’ve done before, but it’s now part of my pre-semester routine.  The last thing I need is open research projects cluttering my already-busy semester.
9. Meet with the professor and make sure all responsibilities are clear.  Be sure you know you’re role in the classroom and behind the scenes.  The last thing you or your professor wants is an unexpected oversight that leads to stress, frustration, or animosity.  Know what’s expected of you and what you can expect from your professor.
10. Check your wardrobe.  I tend to dress nicer than the students, professional but causal, but also make sure I’m not outshining my professor.

Organizing Files

I mentioned above my technique for organizing my course files.  I use my method for both assistantships and seminars.  Digitally, courses are filed chronologically.  For example, my Spring 2010 folder includes subfolders for my seminars on Mythic West, Latin America, and U.S. before 1877, and each class folder contains my “Assignments,” “Clips,” “Notes,” “PDF,” and “Syllabus” structure.

Course readings and notes are also organized in Zotero under a similar system.  The nice thing about digital files is its ease of accessibility and searchability.  Additionally, digital files only take up as much space as your hard drive allows.  Shelves and banker boxes full of course materials are not necessary when course material is organized on a hard drive.  Combined with Mac’s fantastic Spotlight search, locating the exact file you need is a keyword search away.

Despite how digital I try and make my semesters, I inevitably will acquire paper from classes.  For this, I purchase three ring binders to collect physical course material.  The binding of each binder is labeled with the course number, course name, and professor’s name so I can easily glance at my shelf to find what I’m after.  I don’t make the binder system complicated: the syllabus is always the first document in the binder, followed by assignment handouts, exam questions, then notes.  Consistency is your best friend when organizing the mass of material you collect over the course of a semester.

Organizing Life

Just as important to organizing physical course material is the non-physical: the to-do list, the brainstorms, the inspirations, the ideas.  As a soft adherent of GTD, I believe in the principle of ubiquitous capture.  Any thought that enters my mind that I cannot act on the moment I think of it gets written down somewhere.  For this, I have several tools at my disposal.  The first is my trusty Moleskin, which always lives in a pocket inside my messenger bag, set up as an academic Moleskin PDA.  If I have my Blackberry handy, my inbox becomes Evernote.  In other cases (where I have wifi access) I’ll use Evernote or Things on my iPod Touch.  In the case of scheduled events, iCal / Google Calendar sync so I always have some way to access my schedule.

Manage Your Stress, a.k.a, Keep Your Sanity

When the semester begins, your stress level will likely increase, to put it mildly.  To avoid frustration or feeling completely overwhelmed, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Learn the power of a firm but polite “no.”  Colleagues will ask you to serve on committees, students will ask for favors, family members will wonder why you can’t make it home over that three day weekend.  You cannot be all and do everything, and your attempts to do so will burn you out very quickly.  I have my own rule of doing no more than three extra projects in a given semester so I can focus hard rather than lose focus.  This fall, for example, will include my three classes, my TA position and its responsibilities, and co-chairing a graduate student-run conference held in the spring.  My summer research projects or any other tasks that come my way during the academic year, unless very small and requiring minimal energy and time, will be met with a polite “no.”
2. If you accept projects or a favor, be ultra clear about when to expect results.  Let them know it may not be soon and deliver on that deadline.  If your queue is too big, decline the project.  If the project becomes overwhelming, quit the project unless it’s important.  The large-scale accomplishments are more important than the small ones.  And you’ll be expected to have a quick turn-around in your assistantship in terms of grading or delivering material to students.  Don’t let small projects distract you from your responsibilities.
3. Sleep.  You cannot function well by sleeping a few hours per night.  Make due with the time you have or find ways to free up time.
4. Exercise.  Go for a walk, get a dog, join a gym.  Do anything you can to get some activity in your life.  Academics tend to have relatively sedentary work lifestyles, so find some physical activity to be healthier and release stress.
5. Eat.  Coffee is not one of the five food groups.  You’ll feel better if you fill yourself with healthy options.
6. Don’t forget about life.  Don’t let your assistantship — or grad school in general — dissolve your relationship with family and friends.  Get out and enjoy a park, see a movie, play video games, practice guitar, read a non-school book, whatever distraction you like to do to burn off stress.
7. Laugh at perfection.  It’s boring.

How do you organize and prepare for your semester assistantships? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Basic setup for database connection, querying, and returning results.

<?php

define (‘HOSTNAME’, ‘localhost’);
define (‘USERNAME’, ‘username’);
define (‘PASSWORD’, ‘password’);
define (‘DATABASE_NAME’, ‘database’);

$db = mysql_connect(HOSTNAME, USERNAME, PASSWORD) or die (‘I cannot connect to MySQL.’);

mysql_select_db(DATABASE_NAME);

$query = “SELECT * FROM author ORDER by `last_name`”;

$result = mysql_query($query);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo “<p>” , ($row['first_name']) , ($row['last_name']) , “</p>”;
}

mysql_free_result($result);
mysql_close();
?>

The proliferation of linguistic tools for analysis has opened new avenues for historians working in the digital realm. Textual analysis is the study of newspaper articles, books, laws, oral histories, and other forms of human communication. Textual analysis digital tools better enable historians to decipher language usage, frequency, and significance in the context of discourse, rhetoric, and ideas. These robust digital tools thereby provide numerous possibilities that can inform historical research and communication strategies that can introduce new thinking into the current historiography. Brian Pytlik Zillig at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln developed TokenX as a powerful tool for analyzing text. While TokenX continues to undergo revision and further development, tools like this one can help historians integrate textual analysis in their research to analyze connections in language and across several texts.

Accompanying language analysis tools are encoding standards manifest in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard that defines textual elements without compromising the integrity of the original document. Text encoding becomes necessary for making digital representations of original analog materials, a particularly crucial step in digital research for scholars studying eras prior to the proliferation of computers and electronic-born texts. Encoding not only serves to structure sustainable projects but allows for sophisticated analysis of text by a flexible ability to define elements within a document. Furthermore, making texts digital with proper encoding allows more rigorous examination and manipulation of said texts. The more digital texts available for analysis, the better for digital textual analysis tools to articulate and produce visualizations that can create a framework to define, query, and highlight the associations in the record of the past.

TokenX analyzes XML files that can be manually input to the software (assuming the XML document is stored on a server) or built into a digital project, a task accomplished by Pytlik Zillig and CDRH (see, for example, Framing Red Power, William Jennings Bryan and the Railroad, and What Shall be the Character of this Vast Western Territory?). Once a file is “Tokenized,” users can generate word clouds, highlight keywords, view keywords in context, create word counts, and a host of other forms of analysis. Newer features currently being integrated into TokenX allow for n-gram analysis and concordance views of text, both of which help deconstruct texts even further by counting phrases containing an n number of words. Word clouds provide a visual depiction of the frequency of words in a document’s content. Shown by a variation in font size or color depending on their frequency, the word clouds identify the most crucial words used in a document. Another impressive feature in TokenX’s textual analysis rests in being able to view particular words in context. Emphasizing words in their immediate context allows one to visualize that word’s usage in several instances within a document. Through such features, researchers and historians can mine the text for information not visible without machine-aid to demonstrate some connective tissue between the text and a historical argument. Textual visualizations allow scholars to glean what a text or corpus of text is narrating about particular themes, people, or events. Certain elements are highlighted and scholars can investigate these texts in numerous ways to determine why particular words or contexts come into focus while others fade in importance. In terms of scholarly communications, the digital presentation provides an accessible way for historians to narrate their argument. TokenX’s visualizations provide in-depth insights into word contexts within individual and corpus texts and serve as a method for analyzing the connective tissue within language and across texts in time and place.

Recently, TokenX was integrated into student projects with assistance from Pytlik Zillig. This digital tool has aided the students in crafting original historical arguments by highlighting language and word trends. The students first transcribed each of the historical documents used as their source base. Transcribing textual documents into a digital form also provides the historian a deeper familiarity with the document’s content, context, and type of discourse. With a significant corpus of documents made digital users can investigate different keywords and perform the other functions of analysis offered by the tool. Having TokenX integrated into digital projects enable the authors of those projects to make their argument interactive rather than static screen captures of visualizations. The integration of TokenX into digital projects requires you to work through Pytlik Zillig to “Tokenize” the documents and host the material on a server, thus limiting the design capabilities of TokenX. However, the design limitation does not detract from the usefulness of the analysis tool and the value it adds to digital scholarship.

Historians and history instructors will find textual analysis tools, like TokenX, critical for piecing together and visually demonstrating historical analysis to students and colleagues alike.

Brent Rogers and Jason Heppler
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Reviewed: August 2009

Cross-posted at Digital History.

With tools like Google Earth, historians can construct interactive and engaging forms of history. Users can generate graphical representations of events to visually convey events. For instance, Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) collaborated to spread awareness of the genocide in Darfur [link]. The overlay they generated includes descriptive HTML that presents users with first-hand testimonies, pictures, the locations of refugee camps, and links to video clips. The Darfur map included an overlay that could be turned on that displayed 3D columns to visually represent the numbers of displaced persons. Teachers may speak of 200,000 displaced individuals, but to visually represent such numbers conveys greater weight to a subject. The same approach could be taken with historical events, such as using columns to display war casualties in World War II or the location and relevant information of Nazi death camps. Additionally, students could get an idea of how early cartographers viewed the planet with the Dave Rumsey historical maps [link] or explore the geographic and historical data related to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake [link].

Furthermore, since Google Earth is a map in a virtual environment, teachers can literally “fly” students through the terrain that, for instance, Alexander the Great traveled and fought [link]. The ability to see the geography raises new questions and can give students a real sense of what actors in the past dealt with. Taking the students down to the hilly coastal terrain that Alexander and his troops confronted in the Siege of Halicarnassus gives them a clear idea of what they dealt with. The included image overlay conveys not just the geography, but the historical layout of Halicarnassus as it looked in 334 BCE. Pathways can be applied to the terrain to visualize the route armies took over the land. Students could likewise examine the terrain and see battle maps of Alexander’s fight against Darius III in the Battle of Issus.

What ties all of these ideas together is not just the ability to show students something new and exciting, but for them to interact with the tools. Students are free to explore spatial information in constructing historical arguments rather than just present information through lectures and texts. Google Earth also presents the opportunity to increase the exposure to primary sources, including maps, documents at the Library of Congress, or films deposited at the Internet Archive. As we read about in Marie-Laure Ryan’s piece, “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?” (Reading Analysis 7), engaging users with interactive material (in Ryan’s case, hypertext) allows them to draw connections on their own and explore the past through a variety of mediums.

Google Earth presents many “wow” moments as well. The Lewis and Clark map overlay provided by Rumsey was one of those moments. A flat map on a table or in a book might give an idea of what they experienced, but to see the map and discover the breadth of the area they traveled. The archival record is given context not to who or when, but to the terrain and a global picture. An overlay of 1853 San Francisco does not stand alone, but connects itself to the surrounding region and gives users a greater sense of the geography and historical changes that occurred over time.

While we cannot embed Google Earth into our digital scholarship, we can certainly offer the files to readers for them to download and interact with our work. The descriptive HTML can explain key spatial points to our scholarship and include hyperlinks to categories like interpretive essays, secondary literature, and primary sources. Hyperlinking to our online scholarship keeps the project self-contained and thus contributes to project sustainability. Additionally, the XML-based KML encoding ensures a sustainable digitized collection. The interactive possibilities with Google Earth serve historians, students, and general readers in exploring spatial relationships in history.

This post by Rafael Alvarado has been making the rounds on Twitter and got me thinking about, more specifically, what material would be a useful introduction to digital history (as opposed to digital humanities). Here’s my list in chronological order:

1. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945)
2. Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanta-History and History (1974)
   
3. Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown, Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, CD-ROM (1993)
4. Roy Rosenzweig and Michael O’Malley, “Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,” JAH (1997)
5. Edward Ayers, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History” (1999)
6. Edward Ayers, “History in Hypertext” (1999)
7. Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-century Paris” AHR (2000)
8. Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge” (2000)
9. Roy Rosenzweig and Michael O’Malley, “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web,” JAH (2001)
10. David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (2002)
11. Orville Burton, Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2002)
12. Edward Ayers and William G. Thomas, The Valley of the Shadow (2003)
13. Edward Ayers and William G. Thomas, “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” AHR (2003)
14. Roy Rosenzweig, “Scracity or Abudance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” AHR (2003)
15. Dan Cohen, “History and the Second Decade of the Web,” Rethinking History (2004)
16. William G. Thomas, “Computing and the Historical Imagination” (2004)
17. Edward L. Ayers, “Doing Scholarship on the Web: Ten Years of Triumphs–And A Disappointment” Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2004)
18. Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (2005)
19. William G. Thomas, “Writing a Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account,” Digital History (2007)
20. William Turkel, The Programming Historian (2008)
21. Andrew Torget, Texas Slavery Project (2008)
22. “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” JAH (2008)

If you were completely new to digital history and trying to get a grasp of what it was about and what it entailed, this is the list I would probably hand you. The texts might be a bit heavy on the development of digital history as a field rather than the theory of digital history, but at twenty-two books, essays, and projects, I thought I’d cut the list off before it became unwieldy. Perhaps I’ll add a post about reading material for a theory of digital history to my blog post idea list (which grows and grows…). Clearly, this list is not a definite canon of digital history, but I think it gives you a good picture of where the field has been and where it might be going. I’ve tried to catalogue a variety of projects and reading material that I found important to my understanding how the field has (and is) developed.

Any other suggestions? Nit-picks? Disagreements? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

EDIT: Fixed link on the Thomas (2007) piece.

Commentators, participants, and historians have suggested connections between the media and the political movements of the 1960s and their interactions that allowed activists to communicate their agendas. By utilizing media coverage of the Trail of Broken Treaties and ensuing occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 by the American Indian Movement, Indian activists secured a medium in which to voice their goals. The study of the relationship between mass media and the protest movements is important, historian Julia Bond has argued, because “until historians unravel the complex links between the southern freedom struggle and the mass media, their understanding of how the Movement functioned, why it succeeded, and when and where it failed, will be incomplete.” Bond’s declaration can be extended to other movements of the 1960s and 1970s that utilized mass media to their advantage.

The American Indian Movement forcefully inserted their agenda into public discourse and used the print medium to insert their voice into public policy debates. What sort of things were activists talking to the media about? What was the media reporting? Omitting? What was AIM’s message? Did the media report the demonstrator’s goals or was the message lost in the sensationalism of the occupation? Was the occupation of the BIA a successful strategy for disseminating their agenda? Framing Red Power analyzes the ways newspapers covered the American Indian Movement by bringing together digital technologies and traditional historiographical methodologies, allowing historians to pose new questions about the interaction between media sources and political actors.

My first decision in the planning process of the project was an editorial constraint: what sort of print sources would I include in the digital scholarship? I made the decision to focus on major newspapers at the national (New York Times and Washington Post), regional (Minneapolis Tribune and Chicago Tribune), and local (Argus Leader and Rapid City Journal) level. I began compiling my sources by searching online digital repositories like ProQuest and hunting down microfilm sources for anything not digitized. Once the primary sources were located, I began the process of transcription and “mark up” with eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a method of encoding documents with specific information.

With a corpus of digitized newspaper articles, next came the process of integrating digital tools that assist historians in analyzing material. Digital technologies are not an end in and of themselves but rather a method for querying and analyzing material in new ways. Since my purpose was to analyze text and language, I turned to textual analysis tools like Wordle (though I hope in the near future to integrate TokenX, a powerful textual analysis tool developed by Brian Pytlik-Zillig at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, into my project to provide more penetrating and interactive analysis of the articles). With Wordle, I developed visual representations of the newspaper articles that allowed me to spot recurring themes in the text.

Collectively, the newspaper articles appear to focus on Indians, the BIA building, and the federal government far more than they focus on what the activists have to say or why they are in Washington demonstrating. The issues that AIM wanted to call attention to during the demonstration, such as treaty rights or tribal government, are lost in a narrative more interested in the federal response. To prevent skewed results in the word cloud, certain phrases have been strung together. For example, the “Indian” in American Indian Movement is not read by the program as an individual word but rather as part of a phrase. The same is true for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and several other phrases.

The ability to analyze sources with digital technologies allows historians to ask new questions of historical events. Tools like word clouds help to highlight the frequency of language in text, a process impossible (or nearly so) to achieve in print, and reveal ways we can visualize narratives and analyze their significance.

[Cross-posted at Doing Digital History]

Our digital history seminar is currently in the midst of designing our digital projects and has gotten me thinking about how to design digital scholarship and the tools that are available for helping in the construction of projects.  Beginners to digital history are somewhat daunted by the design process.  The lingo of web design – HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, metadata, hypertext – seems like an endless alphabet of ambiguous elements in the digital environment. This post means to highlight some tools and resources digital humanists might find useful in constructing their own projects, as well as impart some of my first-hand experience thus far in the design process.

Like it or not, the truth is that good design matters.  Dan Cohen points out that digital history must be useful and used — useful because users can explore and learn from digital projects, and used because users utilize the resource and spread the word about the project.  We’ve all probably stumbled upon poor websites with eye-straining backgrounds, flashing items, text and images spread everywhere, and a lack of a coherent layout or navigation (check out some of the pages featured on Web Pages that Suck).

The most basic element of web design is HTML, and making things look good on the user’s end may require some use of CSS, which defines how HTML elements are displayed in web browsers.  In addition to understanding how web elements work, historians can also use the help of library sciences and computer sciences to assist them in web design (thank you!).  Several open source tools are also available to help historians design their own projects.

Tools:

FIrefox web browser:  If you’re not using Firefox, you should be.  For starters, Firefox is far more secure and is good at blocking spyware and mal-ware from installing on your computer.  Users can also install extensions and plugins to Firefox to add and improve features on the web browser.  (Some day maybe I’ll write up a post on all the plugins I use on my Firefox browser).

Firebug:  Firebug is a Firefox plugin that gives users a host of web development tools.  With the tool, users can edit, debug, and monitor web encoding (HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.) live on any page.  This allows you to make changes to a site without having to re-upload the files and view the changes.  The tool also allows you to inspect individual elements of a web page to see how they’re constructed.  If you find a site you like, you can use Firebug to view the separate elements of a site and see how they’re constructed and relate to one another.

Web Developer:  Another Firefox plugin useful for web development.  Web Developer allows users to view CSS, HTML source, Javascript, disable elements in a website, and a whole lot more.

Photoshop:  Or its open-source and free alternative, GIMP.  Photoshop/GIMP is a graphics editing software package that allows users to author graphics, edit images, or convert image formats.  Photoshop is far more powerful that GIMP, and GIMP isn’t necessarily a Photoshop clone.  But for basic image work, GIMP is an excellent tool if one can’t afford the pricetag on or have access to Photoshop.

Dreamweaver: Or its open-source and free alternative, Kompozer.  These two programs are WYSIWYG web authoring software packages.  The nice thing about WISIWYG-based web authoring is it doesn’t require coding knowledge to design sites.  The easiest and most common design is table-based layouts, which Dreamweaver handles very well. For more advanced design, Dreamweaver can handle CSS, Javascript, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages, and PHP.

Oxygen XML Editor or XML Marker:  eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is designed for sharing and structuring data on the web that allows users to define mark-up elements.  For example, a newspaper article of mine looks like this (slightly abbreviated):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<sourceDesc>
<bibl>
<author n="Blair, William M.">William M. Blair</author>
<title level="a" type="main">"500 Indians Seize U.S. Building After Scuffle With Capital Police"</title>
<title level="j">New York Times</title>
<pubPlace>New York</pubPlace>
<date value="1972-11-03">03 November 1972</date>
<biblScope type="page">81</biblScope>
</bibl>
</sourceDesc>

<text>
<body>

<div1 type="body">

<head type="main">500 Indians Seize U.S. Building After Scuffle With Capital Police</head>
<p>About 500 American Indians protesting injustices, took control tonight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs....</p>
</div1>
</body>
</text>

The document conforms to Text Encoding Initiative standards.  Most importantly, XML defines the elements behind my newspaper article and preserves the original text.  My editorial decisions for tagging elements has little impact on the text itself.  My site makes the XML code freely available for users so they can download the source files and edit them and use them as they need.

Resources:

W3 Schools:  The W3 Schools provide online web building tutorials that conform to W3C standards.  If you’re looking for a good place to start learning about web design, I would start here.

Web Style Guide: The web style guide is an indispensable resource for learning about web design and thinking about design basics.  This is another must-have resource as you design digital history projects.

Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Designing for the History Web“:  Every beginning digital historian should read Digital History before starting their projects, but this chapter especially is important for thinking about project design and sustainability.  I haven’t touched on sustainability in this post, which is a topic Brent and/or I will probably visit soon.  If there’s no sustainability of a project, then pouring your energy into information architecture is meaningless.  Nevertheless, this resource from two historians is excellent for thinking about good design.

Concluding Thoughts

The design process is just that — a process.  There is no single framework that will apply to designing projects, and the design of a site is likely to undergo several transformations and redesigns.  I like the current design of my digital project, which you can view here on our developmental server, though I doubt this is the final draft of my design — this is only what I’ve been able to put together in the last four months (note the construction is still on-going, so not everything works).  I’m also experimenting with some Web 2.0 ideas that I would like to implement into my project so users can query, search, and manipulate material.

Don’t try and reinvent the wheel with digital history design.  At this stage, I think the important thing is to get your digital scholarship on the web without wasting time and money on design.  It might also be time to start taking advantage of prior digital scholarship and build off of projects that already exist.  For instance, digital historians might find a new argument to make out of the material at the Valley of the Shadow.

The best way to learn this stuff, I’ve found, is to experiment through trial and error.  Embrace the technology and don’t be afraid to dive in.

Do you have any other advice on design or useful tools?  Leave a note in the comments or drop me an email.

In June 2006 the late Roy Rosenzweig published an article entitled “Can History be Open Source?  Wikipedia and the Future of the Past” in the Journal of American History.  Open source models like Wikipedia, Rosenzweig suggests, might offer alternatives to the historian’s highly individualistic and possessive craft.  The triumph of Wikipedia indicates the thirst for free and accessible information people have. The methods and approaches that have characterized Wikipedia’s success raises questions about how we produce, share, and debate scholarly work.

Open source in the technical sense means offering software and code available for free, allowing users to explore, extend, debug, or tweak in a highly collaborative atmosphere (open access refers to the principle of making research freely available; for my purposes I tend to think of the two together and often refer to them interchangeably – for instance, offering the raw XML of a transcribed newspaper article on my digital history project is both open source and open access by providing access to my research and access to the data and encoding behind documents).  Open source began with Richard Stallman, who voiced the idea of making computer code freely available for all to use and edit as long as they shared changes to the software.  In his wake came Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and Brian Behlendorf, the developer of the free web server package Apache.

Although much of open source refers to software development, the principle has entered academic debates over the nature of historical research and scholarship.  Should historical scholarship be free?  Do historians have an obligation to reach scholarly and nonscholarly audiences alike?  Can open source publishing achieve that goal?  The advantages are numerous.  Open source historical work becomes more visible, can be retrieved easily, reach broader audiences, and have a greater impact.  Most junior scholars will be lucky to have 100 copies of their book purchased by libraries worldwide (try searching a newly published monograph on WorldCat and see what comes up).  On the web, however, digital scholarship has the potential of reaching thousands of readers in search of historical material.  We can also track usage on websites and determine what people are reading and using in digital projects, a task that cannot be done with a printed book (how many readers out there have unread books sitting on their shelves?  The purchase of a book doesn’t necessarily mean the information within is being distributed as the author would like).  It is in the interest of professional historians to provide ungated, open access to their work, because doing so increases readership and recognition.  Open access means instantaneous access to research, the ability to correct errors almost immediately, and a radical democratization of knowledge production.

Does this mean we will write free, open source historical scholarship?  Bill Turkel is pioneering this effort with the publication of The Programming Historian, an open-access introduction to programming for historians with little prior programming experience.  There are some real challenges for an open access model, the least of which being the business models currently in place among scholarly societies.  The challenge for them is that there would be little use for large, subscription-based archives like JSTOR if scholarship and research is released online for free.  However, solutions exist for fixing such a problem (as Rosenzweig outlines).  Historians and scholarly societies should start looking at these issues and developing ideas and business models that will work for open access archives, scholarship, and publishing.  If our purpose is to share with others what we know and have learn about the past, then democratic access to scholarship should be our ultimate goal as historians.  Digital technology gives us the tools to rethink the presentation and dissemination of historical scholarship.  Although challenges and questions exist, that should not deter historians from embracing open source historical scholarship and sharing knowledge.  “If historians believe that what is available free on the Web is low quality,” Rosenzweig writes, “then we have a reponsiblity to make better information sources available online.”

The subnotebook – or “netbook” – has become a hot gadget in the last year.  With the introduction of the Asus Eee PC just over a year ago, the market for budget notebooks has exploded.  The first Asus Eee boasted a two-pound, 7 inch screen starting at under $300, an attractive price compared to the “ultra-portable” laptops that often ran above $1,000.  Dell joined the netbook frenzy in October 2008, releasing the Dell Mini 9 for $349 (Linux) or $399 (Windows XP).

The system comes standard with 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB solid state drive, making it a very basic computing machine.  I made some upgrades to the memory (going with 1GB) and the hard drive (going with 8GB).  Being a fan of open source and a user of Linux on my previous laptop, I opted for Linux Ubuntu 8.04.  Ubuntu comes with all the gear I would need for my basic day to day tasks: OpenOffice Suite for word processing (alternatively I often use Google Docs for taking notes when I have access to wireless Internet), Firefox web browser (which I customized with Firebug, Web Developer, AdBlock, and Zotero), and media software for playing audio or viewing videos.  My only other addition has been JungleDisk so I have access to my Amazon S3 server.

Battery life thus far has been fantastic.  Installed with a four-cell battery, Linux estimates I can get nearly four and a half hours of life out of it (I suspect the number is actually closer to three and a half, but thats a far cry better than the one and a half hours I might get from my prior machine).

As the title suggests, this thing is tiny.  The computer is just over an inch thick (1.07″) and weighs just over two pounds.  It’s roughly the size of a book, and riding in my bag I would never know I had a computer with me.  The compact size makes trips to class, the library, the office, and archives a snap.  The display (1024 by 600 resolution) is sharp and clear.

In terms of hardware, the netbook comes standard with three USB 2.0 ports, VGA, Ethernet, and headphone and microphone jacks.  It also comes with a 4-in-1 memory card reader.

Now perhaps the most important part for historians:  the keyboard.  The keyboard might be less cramped than an Asus Eee’s keyboard, but it is still very compact.  Most of the alphanumeric keys are easy enough to use and drafting a document is fairly painless.  However, the Tab, Shift, and Caps key have been shrunk down or placed in unfamiliar spots.  The most frustrating relocated key has been the apostrophe/double quote key.  I find myself often hitting Enter instead (the normal position of the apostrophe key on a QWERTY keyboard is next to Enter), which can be quite irritating.  I’ve been able to retain touch typing rather than hunt-and-peck for the most part, but its been an exercise in retraining my brain to recall some of the new placements.  This computer isn’t designed to replace a main computer.  If you have thoughts about using this as your main computer, I recommend picking up a full-size keyboard, wireless mouse, and external monitor.  The keyboard construction, however, is well built.  There’s little flex in the keyboard as you type and the keys are responsive.

The touchpad is decently sized, has a good textured feel to it, has great sensitivity and response, and can easily naviage the desktop.  Two mouse buttons are located below the touchpad.

If the machine is reserved to word processing, surfing the web, or checking email, the Dell Mini 9 is a great machine.  As a portable tool for research, taking notes, or PowerPoint, coupled with its nice pricetag and ease of use, it would be hard to go wrong.

The Nebraska Crew^TM made it back safely from Salt Lake, where a group of us attended the WHA Conference. I think I can speak for the group when I say we had a blast.  Additionally, the digital history panel went as well as we could’ve hoped.  There were a couple of problems.  Unfortunately, Dr. Seefeldt was unable to join us and Nathan lost his voice (though regained enough of it to present) and we didn’t have wireless Internet, the panel went off without a hitch and generated some great discussion.  And having Dr. Richard White comment on the panelists was a real honor.  If you weren’t able to attend, check out Doing Digital History to catch up on the three presentations and add some comments.  My guess is one of us will be doing at least one more post about the conference at DDH.

The remainder of the conference was great as well, although I wish the panels hadn’t been spread out between two buildings.  And there might have been a more appropriate hotel to host the conference at.  The Marriott was built for the 2002 Olympics and designed to maximize the number of people they could fit into the building rather than designed for conferences, so the conference rooms were small and almost every panel I attended had people standing during the presentations.  Overall, however, a positive experience for my first WHA conference.

In other news, I’ve picked up the diminutive and cheap Dell Mini 9 and have to say I’m really impressed so far.  I had debated between the Dell, HP Mini-Note PC, and Asus Eee PC for a while before deciding on Dell.  I’ve had good experiences with Dell throughout the years I’ve been using them and decided to stay loyal.  Part of the reason I enjoy the Mini 9 so much is that it’s running Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), though you can pick one up that runs Windows XP.  I’ve become a great fan of open source.  Linux runs better than XP and is powerful enough for my needs (my desktop runs XP which I use for my high-powered computing needs).  I’ve been a Windows user for all my life, and have interacted with Mac systems a handful of times.  I didn’t have the funds to pick up a Mac, which probably would’ve been my ideal choice for a new laptop, but for a computer I plan on using in class, taking notes on while reading or at archives, emailing, surfing the web, blogging, and other low-power tasks, the netbook is all I required.  I’ll post a review of the netbook later this week after I use it a bit more.