Week 8: Wikipedia

In the spirit of my article "Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies," I devote an entire week of this seminar (and a blog assignment) to Wikipedia.

General:

• Let’s develop a list of things that people who use Wikipediashould understand about it.

Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): 141-46.

• What factors limit historians’ willingness to contribute to Wikipedia?
• Ten years down the road, which of Rosenzweig’s observations about Wikipedia are still useful and valid?
• What does this line suggest about Wikipedia’s orientation?: “whom Wales knew from their joint participation in online mailing lists and Usenet discussion groups devoted to Ayn Rand and objectivism”
• What do you think of the Wikipedia’s review process? Compared to traditional academic peer review, what advantages and disadvantages does it offer?
• Is it true that encyclopedias do not break new ground intellectually?
• What does NPOV mean? What are its implications for writing content for Wikipedia?
• Who contributes to Wikipedia?
• What is the right word for people who do stuff on Wikipedia? Writers, editors, contributors, Wikipedians?
• What makes for good historical writing? Do you agree that writing is better in professional historical sources than on Wikipedia? Why?
• What precautions should you take before assuming the credibility of any given entry in Wikipedia?
• Should we encourage or discourage students from using Wikipedia?
• What do you think of Rosenzweig’s criticism about good academic sources being locked behind paywalls?
• Do you agree that Wikipedia’s Discussion pages amount to historiographic debate?
• Do you agree that historians should contribute to Wikipedia? Would you contribute on a regular basis? How would you feel about having your “contributions” changed?

"Wikipedia: School and University Projects"

• Given the very small scale of the assignment for this class, do you think I should have observed Wikipedia’s rules for class projects more closely?

Shawn Graham, “The Wikiblitz: A Wikipedia Editing Assignmentin a First-Year Undergraduate Class,” Writing History in the Digital Age

• “Digital media make all history public history (whether we like it or not),[4] and we need to get our research into that positive feedback loop.”
• ‘Understanding how the code forces a particular worldview on the user is a key portion of becoming a “digital historian.”’ How much about coding do you think you need to know? How does coding affect our experience of reading a text or site?
• How does the necessity of “monitoring” changes you make to Wikipedia affect your inclination to be a contributor?
• “Wikipedia is not just the content of a given page but also the network structure of links that connect pages together.”
• What is the role of “bots” in running Wikipedia?
• Why do you think the history majors resisted participating in this class exercise by staying out sick?

Timothy Messer-Kruse, “The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth onWikipedia,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, February 12, 2012, 

• Why doesn’t expertise matter on Wikipedia?
• Why does a “majority” determine what gets included on Wikipedia?
• What does the existence (and persistence) of “Wiki-gatekeepers” suggest about the general claim that “just anyone” can edit Wikipedia?
• “"Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."”
• Looking at the entry on "the Haymarket affair" now, it looks to me like Messer-Kruse’s changes got through.

Martha Saxton, “Wikipedia and Women’s History: A ClassroomExperience,” Writing History in the Digital Age

• Why aren’t primary source citations “verifiable”?
• What kind of resistance to incorporating women’s history into Wikipedia did Martha Saxton’s students encounter?

Amanda Seligman, “Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies,” Writing History in the Digital Age

• What attitudes about encyclopedias in general, and Wikipedia in particular, have you encountered in your classes?
• Do you use reference works in your own research?
• Could you detect arguments in the Wikipedia entries that you looked at for this week’s discussion?
• How did you learn about the existence of argument in secondary historical sources? At this point in your education, do you feel comfortable identifying them?
• [Back up and discuss the process of developing the Writing History in the Digital Age project.]

Siobhan Senier, “Indigenizing Wikipedia: StudentAccountability to Native American Authors on the World’s Largest Encyclopedia,” Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning 

• What counts as “notable” according to Wikipedia standards?
• [Discuss the differences between the Writing History in the Digital Age and the Web Writing process and formats]
• Does Wikipedia merit the sustained and organized efforts to improve it, such as those organized by feminist scholars?
• ‘But “reliability,” of course, is slippery: even in the academic realm, telling our students that university presses are “better” than “the Internet” isn’t teaching them critical thinking.’
• Should professors grade students’ Wikipedia contributions? How?

Robert S. Wolff, “The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, andWikipedia,”Writing History in the Digital Age 

• What does Wolff show us about Wikipedia as a site of popular memory?
• What is Wolff’s research method?
• “More than just an encyclopedia, Wikipedia serves as a people’s museum of knowledge, a living repository of all that matters, where the exhibits are written by ordinary folk, with nary an academic historian in sight.”

Week 7: #Twitterstorians

Discuss experience of trying to understand the AHA through Twitter

How could you use Twitter for your future historical work (broadly considered)? Will you?

Leah Wright, “Tweet Me a Story,” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning

• What is Wright trying to teach her journalism students to do? Which of these skills apply to historical writing?
• Is brevity a virtue or a vice for historians?
• Did the student Tweeters tweet similarly to or differently from the scholars in the “Embedded Backchannel” article?
• What role does Twitter have in news reporting now?
• Why would you want to use Storify to compile tweets?
• How could you use Twitter and Storify to engage students in an undergraduate history class? In a museum exhibit? In a digital history project?

C. Ross, M. Terras, C. Warwick, and A. Welsh, “Enabled Backchannel: Conference Twitter Use by Digital Humanists,” Journal of Documentation, 67(2) (2011): 214-237.

• What did Ross et al. try to investigate about scholars’ use of Twitter for conferences?
• What did they find?
• What methodological problems did they encounter?
• Is Tweeting in public fora such as conferences disruptive or fragmenting?
• How do the peculiarities of Twitter make formal analysis difficult?
• Page 219: “Tweets were divided into seven categories: comments on presentations; sharing resources; discussions and conversations; jotting down notes; establishing an online presence; and asking organizational questions.”
• Page 221: “the presence of the @ sign signifies that the Tweet is part of a conversation.”
• Page 221: “This lends support to the notion of a “90:9:1” rule (Nielson, 2006) for new social media, where 90 per cent of users are lurkers, 9 per cent of users contribute from time to time and 1 per cent participate a lot and account for the majority of contributions.”
• Why would non-attendees use a conference hashtag?
• Page 224: ‘Twitter challenges the traditional authorial boundaries that are associated with writing and the word “text”.’

#aha2105

• Frustrated that non-historian groups are using the same hashtag? Try using advanced search to limit by date around the early January 2015 time of the AHA meeting.
• Is there a way around reading the conference backwards in time?
• To what uses do you see Twitter users putting the hashtag?
• If you were going to use these tweets to write an essay about the meeting, how would you go about tackling the problem of reading and managing your notes?
• Why do I go into skimming mode when reading Twitter instead of careful reading?
• How do historians use Storify to communicate about #aha2015?
• Should/Would you embargo your thesis or dissertation?

Week 6

An expected highlight of this week's class is that our two student project groups will be turning in their proposals for their final projects: a grant proposal.

General questions 

• What is Web 2.0?
• What is “Shared Authority”?  Where do you come down on question of the role of experts and non-experts in presenting the past?
• Why would a member of the public participate in a shared authority digital project when they could just start their own blog or put up a website?
• What is the role of museum staff in the world of public curation of content?
• Why is it important to this book that the editors see a continuity between participation in the 20^th century physical spaces and the 21^st century virtual spaces?
• Is “Humans of New York” an example of Letting Go?

Nina Simon, “Participatory Design and the Future of Museums”

• What is a “folksonomy”?
• What kind of participatory techniques have you found engaging on the web?
• Do you agree that feedback has to get used?
• What is the relationship between participatory feedback and the “trending” feature of sites like Facebook and Twitter?
• Do you want to go to museums where visitors create the content? (I did at this one: http://cmany.org/)
• What is the difference between the Unsuggester and spam?

Steve Zeitlin, “Where Are the Best Stories? Where Is My Story?”

• What is the distinction between contributed stories and curated stories?
• Is Facebook a museum?
• If they are curating the content of cityofmemory.org, in what senses are they “letting go”?

Matthew Fisher and Bill Adair, “Online Dialogue and Cultural Practice: A Conversation”

• What are the underlying reasons for Shared Authority?
• Digital engagement tools: Favoriting, Tagging, Commenting, Blogging
• Is history just “a collection of truths”? What is the role of analysis in public engagement?

Matthew MacArthur, “Get Real! The Role of Objects in the Digital Age”

• I wonder what the role of 3-D printing might be in the curation of digital objects.
• Do you think that the physical experience or the digital experience of museums is more important?

Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, chapter 5

• Should historians be responsible for getting digital content online?
• What do you think of representing history with “thought experiments”? What is the goal of teaching history?
• What is “backwards design”?
• What do you think of Kelly’s Lying About the Past experimental course?
• Is it OK to ask students to put false information into Wikipedia? Into the Internet?
• Why does Kelly narrate the hoax in the present tense as if he was going to teach the course again?
• Could Kelly have generated similar enthusiasm among his students if he had found a well-documented but obscure historical figure for them to research and document? That is, what is the role of “hoaxing” in this class?
• What was the educational value in Kelly’s experiment?
• What is the point of teaching students to write papers?

Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, “Conclusion”

• Do you agree with Kelly’s underlying belief that young people (=students) prefer to represent their learning about history in a variety of non-written formats?

Week 5: Digital Archives and Full-Text Databases

General questions for consideration:

• What is a database? In what ways is a full-text database parallel to an archive? In what ways is it different?
• Are we talking about data or evidence or something else?
• Generate list of questions you automatically ask yourself when picking up a book or looking at an archival collection. What is a comparable list for using a full-text database for research?

Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, “Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information: The Women and Social Movements Web Site,” in Writing History in the Digital Age

• What do they mean by “document project”? What is involved in producing one? How is it different from the kinds of research projects that historians usually conduct?
• In what sense is it a database? In what sense is their site a journal?
• Why did they join a contract with Alexander Street Press? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a commercial arrangement? What provisions have they made against ASP’s disappearance?
• Why do they combine primary sources and interpretive texts?
• What form do the primary sources take in their database? Why don’t the documents appear in their original form?
• What advantages are there to having so many primary sources digitized on a single site?
• How did this project come to take on preservation as a mission?
• Is this project a realization of the “recombinant documents” that Mills Kelly wrote about?
• What happens to your interpretation of a document when it is extracted from its archival context?

(D2L) Nancy Chaffin Hunter, Kathleen Legg, and Beth Oehlerts, “Two Librarians, an Archivist, and 13,000 Images: Collaborating to Build a Digital Collection,” Library Quarterly 80(1) (2010): 81-109.

• What is the University Historic Photograph Collection at Colorado State University?
• Who created it, and how?
• In what ways is digital browse better than file-cabinet browse? Are there disadvantages?
• Can you make sense of the work flow visualization?
• What do you learn about librarians and archivists from this article?
• How does a library-science literature review differ from a historiography?
• What is a metadata librarian?
• Would you consider this project a digital history project? Why or why not?
• In what sense is it a database? In what sense is it interpretive?

Charles Upchurch, “Full-Text Databases and Historical Research: Cautionary Results from a Ten-Year Study,” Journal of Social History 46 (1) (Fall 2012): 89-105.

• What are the advantages of full-text databases? What are the disadvantages?
• What do you need to know about the databases you are working with before you start to seriously analyze your data? Develop a list of questions. How would you find answers to these questions? How useful did Upchurch find it to ask the database publishers?
• What do you learn from this article about how OCR works? What is “article zoning”? What is “fuzzy searching”?
• What does this article teach us about research design?
• What does it teach us about how to keep track of our own research processes?
• What do you learn about use of keyword search from this article?
• Under what kinds of research plans would you want to keep track of all the searches you conducted? What would be a good method for keeping track?

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapter 3-4

Chapter 3, “Becoming Digital”

• How do you know that it is worth it to conduct a digitization project? Should we just be digitizing everything? How can we set priorities?
• What losses should you be cognizant of when you think about digitized sources?
• What are the possible options for digitizing text that they describe?
• How did the authors of the other articles we read for today go about answering the kinds of questions Cohen and Rosenzweig raise about what is worth doing and what is not worth doing?
• Do you think it is better for scholars to annotate (mark up) documents for other people to use, or to work with full-text search? Are there reasons you might choose one rather than the other for one project, and then use the other for another project?
• Laying OCR underneath a scanned image.
• Why is typing sometimes better? I wonder if this is still true now that a decade has elapsed since this book’s publication.
• When thinking about digitizing images, audio, or video, what qualities do you need to consider that you would not bother with for text?
• What considerations should you keep in mind about whether to contract out the digitization?
• If you “do the work yourself” is it really free? How could you account for the cost of doing it yourself?
• How should you find out what standards to use now?

Chapter 4, “Designing for the History Web”

• What elements of website design do you consider essential?
• How important is visual appeal for the project your group is developing?
• To what extent is it important to make design choices for your grant application project?
• Will you chose a URL?

Week 4: There is a lot of information out there for historians to work with

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

• What digital aspects of your life alone disappear?
• What are the difficulties of preserving digital primary sources?
• How do you know when you have done enough research? Have you ever faced a situation where you thought you had found and examined all the relevant primary sources?
• Rosenzweig argues that we face a future task of writing history in a world in which there are too many records for us to cope with, disappearing evidence, and a broadened audience.
• Are these technical problems, or should we historians truly be concerned?
• Why are digital documents vulnerable?
• Blurring and merging of professional responsibilities. Historians, archives, and museums. Who should be responsible for keeping the machines needed to read old digital primary sources?
• Is it important to read (or at least store) digital primary sources in their original format, or would physical copies suffice?
• How do copyright and ownership issues enter the picture of preserving digital sources?
• Why have historians been ignoring the problems of preserving digital sources?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of letting commercial enterprises have control of archiving?
• How might the challenges outlined in this article shape the kind of historical writing that we will see over the next decades?

David Armitage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto, chapter 4:

• Did you read this online or download it? What is Open Access?
• What can you infer from the website hosting The History Manifesto about the authors’ goals and relationship to digital history? How successful do they seem at achieving those goals, based on their site? What opportunities for interacting with The History Manifesto do they make available?
• How does it affect your reading experience to have the outline of the book always available in the left hand margin of the screen? How about the footnote functionality? What was your experience of “turning pages” and “turning sections”? Why isn’t there a “next section” button at the bottom of the page?
• What do they mean by “machine-read”? Should we think of this activity as reading?
• How do their inquiries fit particularly with their other scholarly focus on the longue durée?
• What kinds of unfamiliar historical research approaches do they discuss? Can you imagine yourself needing to use any of them? Wanting to?
• What is Paper Machines?
• Panama Zotero group: again the blurring of historians, archivists, and librarians.
• What is involved in visualizing text-based “data”? Is the visualization enough?
• What does this sentence mean?: “Traditional research, limited by the sheer breadth of the non- digitised archive and the time necessary to sort through it, becomes easily shackled to histories of institutions and actors in power, for instance characterising universal trends in the American empire from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations’ investments in pesticides, as some historians have done.”
• Examples of the “untapped sources of historical data”? Are those sources digitally available? How much work is involved in digitizing them so that historians can work with them in the ways Guldi and Armitage envision?
• How are we ever going to keep track of this hyperabundance of information—and scholarly discussions of it—so that we can know what to go look at? How would you know to go looking for the Declassification Engine, for example? How can you prevent yourself from going out and laboriously duplicating someone else’s tech work?
• “This enterprise points to the hunger in the private sector for experts who understand time – on either the short durée or the long.”
• Does this chapter represent a demonstrated claim or an extended assertion (or polemic)?
• “In a world of mobility, the university’s long sense of historical traditions substitute for the long-term thinking that was the preserve of shamans, priests, and elders in another community.”
• What special skills do historians bring to the discussion of big data? “The reading of temporally generated sequences of heterogeneous data is a historian’s speciality.”
• If you “read” big data broadly, can you still know something deeply?
• Are you persuaded by this:  “Their training should evolve to entertain conversations about what makes a good longue durée narrative, about how the archival skills of the micro-historian can be combined with the overarching suggestions offered by the macroscope. In the era oflongue-durée tools, when experimenting across centuries becomes part of the toolkit of every graduate student, conversations about the appropriate audience and application of large-scale examinations of history may become part of the fabric of every History department.”
• Do you see yourself in this?: “Historians may become tool-builders and tool-reviewers as well as tool-consumers and tool-teachers.”

                                                                                           

Prepping for class

One of my unsolved problems as an instructor of digital history is managing the readings that I assign. Not, of course (!) in the sense of getting the reading done. But because I have assigned almost all digital materials, I am doing my reading on the computer. Which, in this case, is the laptop I work with at home. I have not figured out how I as the instructor should manage the readings when we talk about them in class. I do make a practice of pulling them up on the class computer and monitor so that we can all turn to the same "page" if necessary. But I can't idly and subtly look through an article for a particular passage without making it patently obvious to the students that I am not attending wholly to what they are saying. I could possibly have the readings on a second laptop in class, but then I as an instructor will be sitting behind a wall of screens, dividing myself from my class.

I wonder how other professors deal with this problem.

Week 3

This is a key week in the class: we will divide into groups to work on semester-long projects. I have never put students into long-term groups before, so I am a little apprehensive about how to do it. Right now my intent is to let some (controlled) chaos reign and see if the students sort themselves into groups without help. If they need help, my plan is to have them engage in "speed dating," each talking to everyone else in the class for a fixed amount of time (e.g. two minutes) to test whether they will get along well enough to work together. Following the speed-rounds, students could submit to me a list of people they want to work with, and I could take a couple of minutes to organize the groups on that basis.

No one signed up to give a presentation this week, which might be just as well given the need to break into groups. Depending on how long it takes to organize into groups, I intend to take the students on a guided tour of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee's successful grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reading questions:

Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age

Chapter 3

 
What does he mean about books “reading each other”?
What does he mean by “recombinant documents”? Why might you want such things?
What kind of metadata do you take in about primary sources, almost unconsciously, when you start to work with them in traditional formats? How do you get this metadata from digital sources?
What kind of new questions are made possibly by the availability and searchability of digital primary sources? How would this availability change your plans for your own research projects? Would you still travel to archives to conduct research?
What is “text mining”? Why would you want to do this? Given the amount of information produced, how would you make sense of it? Is close reading obsolete?

Chapter 4

What history-writing skills do you think that you (and students) need in the 21^st century? Does the standard college essay format teach you those skills?

How do you feel about requiring students to write in public instead of just handing in their work to the professor to read? How should we take into consideration student privacy issues when putting their work in the public realm?

What do you think about the comparison to basketball: that we teach basketball by having students handle the ball from the outset; and we should have students “make” history right from the outset as well?

Are you familiar with the idea of the Dublin Core standards?

What do you think about designing (undergraduate) courses around skills and understanding rather than around content?

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapters 1-2

Chapter 1:

19: why wouldn’t a  history website be accepted as “academic venture”?

22: how Yahoo’s organization (“librarian’s touch of classification”) helped; how is history presently organized/accessible on the internet?

What does he mean by “deep web”? Why don’t searches pull up materials behind paywalls? What would you do if they did?

25: list of 5 main types of history websites: archives, secondary sources, teaching, discussion, organizational. Have these five categories blurred more or separated more since this book was published in 2005?

29: it is easy to see why amateur enthusiasts don’t care about provenance of primary documents. But why does provenance matter to scholars?

Why isn’t there a convention to italicize (or put in quotation marks) the titles of websites in use in this book?

Do you think blogs have successfully challenged the journal article?

44: why have libraries and archives taken to the web to expand their mission to teaching?

50: Is their charge to become familiar with how history is done on the web before getting started with your own project still realistic?

Chapter 2:

53: example of 20,000 documents stored in a database and displayed on the web only when called up. Why is this a sound strategy for presenting information digitally? What does it imply about how the contents have to be organized and stored?

Do you need to know HTML to do digital history? What do you need to know about HTML?

Do you agree that HTML is basically readable?

How do you look at the source code for a web page, as they recommend?

What kind of planning process for your digital project do they recommend?

Generate a list of questions you should be asking yourself as you plan your group projects.

59: In discussing the question of whether you need to learn to code, they make a comparison to reading Dante’s Inferno in English translation. Does this comparison work for you? Would you venture to produce scholarship on Dante if you read it only in English?

Why do they so routinely include the price of software in their discussion?