Session 4: A lot of content and a lot of users

 This week we will be talking about the problem of the web: there are so many websites and so many potential audience members. How do we relate to them and each other?

The readings are:

·         Kelly, TeachingHistory in the Digital Age, chapter 3

·         Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review 108 (3) (2003): 735-762.

·         Alisea Williams McLeod, “Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery: Problems and Possibilities,” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, edited by Jack Dougherty et al., http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/crossing-boundaries/student-digital-research-and-writing-on-slavery-problems-and-possibilities/

·         Cohen and Rosenzweig,chapter 5 

Kelly, chapter 3

• What does it mean to suggest that documents “read each other”? What are the valences of the word “recombinant”?
• What are the differences between the HTML and XML markup examples (presidential speeches)? What does Kelly say is the significance of those differences?
• What kinds of problems does the abundance of digital primary sources create for historians? How can we keep track of all the sources we can find, much less read and analyze them all?
• Tools like JSTOR as more than just repositories for keeping track of journals, but potentially offering a powerful, new kind of search that will create juxtapositions of sources we could not easily bring together on our own.
• How much is an “exabyte”?
• Is this comment overblown: “being able to use machine methods for making sense of this massive database of historical text is no longer a luxury—it is an imperative.” Are our goals as historians and teachers of history about accessing the past through every possible route, or about understanding what we are capable of understanding? Does it matter, if (for example), I can’t use quantitative analysis or read a non-English language? Are these tools simply expanding the range of what some of us can do, or are they placing new imperatives on us for the central tasks of historical understanding?
• “Software still cannot analyze text in all the ways a historian would, but it can suggest interesting starting points for that analysis, and with each passing year the text mining and analysis algorithms get better and better.” This passage suggests that historians need to learn to skirt back and forth between mining data and reading evidence. Do we need to teach data mining in graduate school? To undergraduate history majors?

Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance?”

• What are the problems of scarcity and abundance that we face in the digital age?
• What are the problems involved in preserving the digital record? What are the problems of interpreting in the digital record?
• What kinds of gaps in historical evidence can you recall having run into in your own research?
• Are we likely ever to encounter “an essentially complete historical record”?
• Will the students in the class who are also in SOIS talk about what they know about the preservation of digital records?
• The problem of ownership of digital records. How does private ownership affect your ability to access sources?
• What does this comment about the Pitt Project mean: it “broadens the role of archives and archivists through its focus on ‘records as evidence’ rather than ‘information’”? What is the distinction between information and evidence being made here?
• What would you do if historical research were “disintermediated”? What is the ongoing role of libraries and especially archives?

Alisea Williams McLeod, Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery: Problems and Possibilities, Web Writing

• How does this faculty member take advantage of the abundance of digital resources to transform her students’ learning experiences?
• “I believe that a new infusion of history into American culture—through digitization and social media—may raise an issue of our students’ rights to their own temporality as we increase their exposure to controversial, historical documents.” What might she mean by this? How might her field—Rhetoric and Composition—encourage practitioners to think about time in a different way than historians approach it?
• Why would the chance to share their research with the public through the internet incentivize students to continue their involvement beyond the period of the semester?
• “ongoing digitization of historic records like the ROF make it all but inevitable that not only they but the entire world will soon have to confront problems and possibilities that come from widespread re-infusion of the historical.” Given what our other authors suggest about the problem of abundance, is it likely that digitization of historical records will encourage everyone to think about the past more? Or will we be overwhelmed?

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapter 5

• We have a potentially abundant audience—but how can we find it and let it know about our projects?
• Do you feel a reluctance to build an audience, or a lack of knowledge about how to do so?
• What do you think about the ideas for DH website promotion that DC&RR discuss? What opportunities do they omit because they were not available when the book was published in 2006?
• When should you work on the publicity for your project?
• How will you know if your site is being well used?