Kay Washechek’s Digital History Blog

I spent an excessive amount of time in the Digital Media Lab with Sam and Cammy yesterday.  We worked on cleaning up the pages through proofreading. We also reformatted the pages so that the information on them is presented in a uniform way.  Some of our posts in the other buildings of significance tab were rather short so I went though Dr. Alvey and Dr. Crawley’s books to expand the posts. I am happy to say that I was able to find several new antidotes which had not been mentioned in the original posts. In addition to researching, I also had the pleasure of fixing citations after we had switched around the text in the original posts to ensure a uniform format for each page…I think the best description of my experience can be described as “trial by error.” Even though the editing process is proving to be extremely tedious, I am happy with the progress we have made and I am looking forward to continuing work on the site tonight after I am finished with classes for the day.

Doing History in the Digital Age by Barbara Weinstein was an interesting read.
I was intrigued by the way she compared and contrasted the world of research which exists today thanks to the web with the kind of research our professors experienced when they were our age. It is so odd to think on how rapidly things change! One of the most interesting aspects of Weinstein’s article was that she concluded by saying that with the availability of online sources it has become possible to do dissertations without actually visiting local archive where the research stems from, but that there is no fun to be found in doing research that way. I completely disagree with her because even though it may not “fun” to research on the web, the amount of information available to historians on the web is truly helpful and allows us to access information we might have otherwise missed.

I also enjoyed reading Clio and the Bloggers by Anthony Grafton. I really enjoyed reading the article because it reminded me of our discussions about the potential for scholarly collaboration offered by blogs. I was also interested in the way Grafton compared blogging to having coffee with colleagues.

Reading Dr. McClurken’s article reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother when I went home for Christmas break. I was sitting at the kitchen counter telling my mom about the kinds of papers I have been writing at UMW and my mother said something to the effect of “the invention of computers has made it possible for students to do more than they did when I was in school.”
Dr. McClurken made a similar comment about the limited use of archives by his students in the 1990s. Although the creation of the web has enabled students to access a large volume of sources electronically, and that has raised issues regarding the credibility of sites, it is still amazing to think about how much more is available to the undergraduate students of today. Another interesting aspect of the article was the possibility of not involving archivists in education.

This week we have been making finishing touches to our site. We have also been organizing our speech for the Research and Creative presentation. All that remains to do is to finish proofreading posts and to make a few minor changes to the site.

This week was interesting because we switched from posts to pages. Cassie designed wonderful posters to advertise our site and Cam added a sticky note picture to our site which says “work in progress.”  I spent my week finishing a history of the UMW campus buildings which included a section on the many name changes of the college and has is linked to a UMW blog on the history of the college’s namesake, Mary Ball Washington.

I also added tags to each of the Residence Hall posts. However, when we switched to pages, we lost the ability to tag our posts.  Now we need to figure out how we can add meaningful tags to the site. I also hyperlinked all of the names of the individuals we mentioned in our Contributors page to their sites/pages on the UMW site. Let the stalking begin…

This weekend, I plan to do a significant amount of proofreading. I will also continue to upload our current pictures to the site. I also want to spruce up the piece I wrote on the history page because it is rather dry.

The University of Mary Washington recently celebrated its centennial anniversary and for those hundred years of development, the historic buildings of the university served as a timeline of the school’s changing social and academic atmosphere. Each building on the University of Mary Washington’s campus has a unique history and was named for auspicious individuals in the history of the university and the history of America. Our site seeks to educate the community about the developmental narrative of the university and how the contributions of the people for whom the buildings are named helped the University of Mary Washington become the academic icon it is today.  We hope that prospective students, current students, alumni, and the general public  will utilize  our site to gain knowledge about the University of Mary Washington and its history.  Our site will feature past and present photos of campus, an interactive map, and  a history of each of the buildings on campus as well as biographies for their namesakes. For the most part, the names of the buildings honor generous benefactors, forward-thinking politicians, and university faculty that made their irreversible mark on the school. The University of Mary Washington is infused with the history of the ages it has witnessed and the extraordinary buildings on campus stand as stalwart monuments.

This week has been incredibly busy!  I went with Kayle and Cam to see Tim this afternoon. We were able to accomplish several of our goals for the site. Tim is currently working on the map, and is going to send us information on how to upload information to the completed map when he has finished installing it. The situation with the tag cloud is interesting and it looks like we will not actually need one for our site. Instead, we can simple create tags within each of the post by using the quick edit section of the site. The new color scheme for our site has been installed, and looks very similar to the UMW website. While we were speaking with Tim, Kayle suggested that we remove the RSS feed from the bottom of the site.  I agree because I think it might help the site to look slightly less cluttered….Thoughts? I have also been brain storming as to how we can attract more visitors to the site. I think it might be fun to create flyers for the campus residence halls which have a pull off tabs with the URL of our site and the dates we will be presenting. Business cards could also be exciting… I definitely want to create a Facebook event page so that we can invite friends and family to our presentations/ let people know about our work.  As far as this weekend goes, I will finish taking photos for the site, complete the piece I am writing for the History of UMW and continue looking through the site in an effort to improve the quality of the work we are presenting.

This weeks discussion was fascinating to me. Before class I would have said that I agreed with Carr’s assessment of the affect the internet is having on scholarly development because I have seen more and more of my peers relying solely on online sources for information. It was interesting to hear another side of the story during our discussion and and I may be converting to the dark side….:-) Seriously though, the amount of data available on the web today is truly amazing. Even though some aspects of information are lost during text mining such as tone and context, I still feel that the pros outweigh the cons because text mining can enable researchers to track trends and locate patterns which would have otherwise taken years of study.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Bryan Alexander’s presentation (and not just because I was two seats away from President Hurley!)

One of the most interesting aspects of his presentation was his reference to Black Swans i.e. unlikely events which have the potential to drive civilization. Apparently this illustration was not a hit in Australia. J I was also fascinated by the concept of using data from crowd sourcing to predict the future.

Dr. Bryan Alexander presented us with four possible futures with intriguing connotations. They were Phantom Learning, The Lost Decade, Alt Residential and Renaissance. Phantom Learning was the most interesting possible future to me because I see aspects of that future in my daily life. For example, one of the main aspects of the future “Phantom Learning” was that schools will cease to be places where students will congregate and online classes will become more popular.  I think the idea of online classes where students can interact with their professors and peers in an online setting is a fascinating concept. I could not help but think that more online classes could decrease the cost of attending university which might make school a more affordable option.

The presentation was highly unusual to me because it was very interactive and there were several slightly random tangents. One of the most interesting digressions of the evening was the mention of the development of Google Goggles. Apparently, new technology is being developed which will enable people to hold up their phones to buildings, mountain ranges and other objects and the phone will instantly pull up relevant information such as the history of the building and the name of the mountain range. I was fascinated by this possibility because I think it will make being a tourist slightly easier and will certainly further learning.

After we submitted our application for the creativity presentation my group discussed our progress and what we still need to finish before our site is complete.  This week coming week I have set up a meeting with Tim on Thursday at 12:15 to add some new features to our site. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have the interactive map uploaded to the site. We are also going to ask him about how we can set up a tag cloud for our site because even though Sam added a Facebook like button to our site, we want to make our site available to as many viewers as possible. Having a tag cloud could increase the number of hits on our site.  We also want to find a color scheme for our site which complements the map which will be a key feature of our site.

Here is the link to my digital portfolio!

http://kmw21.umwblogs.org/

Here is the link to the beginning of my digital portfolio. The only pages I have added information to are my travel page, and my blogs page.

http://kmw21.umwblogs.org/travel/