The last few days, my Twitter stream has lit up with justified outrage about the banning of ethnic studies–and related books–in Arizona’s classrooms. What has especially made news is the Tucson Unified School District’s seizure of the banned books. Opponents of ethnic studies in Arizona’s schools claim that such curricula “divide [students] by race and…
It makes me sad to say that this is my last blog post for Clio Wired I. I have learned a great deal, and really enjoyed learning both the bigger picture of digital history, and some hands-on skills with it. So, we come to the final post for class. What difference does new media make…
This week’s readings (Week 13) focused on the interrelated, sometimes opposed, issues of copyright and open access in scholarly (and other) communication. I greatly enjoyed all of the readings, but the one that resonated with me most was Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. This well-written book–so well-written that in spite of having plenty of other readings,…
This week’s readings (Week 12) focused on what can broadly be called “citizen history” or “crowdsourcing”–inviting public participation in the process of creating knowledge, not just waiting to receive the end product. The four articles, Roy Rosenzweig on Wikipedia, Jeff Howe’s Wired piece on crowdsourcing, a Smithsonian report [PDF] on the Institution’s collaboration with the…
Of this week’s readings, I found Martyn Jessop’s “Digital Visualization as a Scholarly Activity” [PDF] particularly interesting, as it got me thinking about other class discussions we’ve had about the nature of scholarship, and particularly what counts as scholarship. This article discusses visualization as scholarship. Similar to Jo Guldi‘s argument that spatialization has a long…
This week’s readings concerned the question of scholarship in the digital realm. Specifically, what is digital scholarship, and how is it evaluated? As the semester has gone on, we’ve learned how the digital makes a difference in format. As Lev Manovich discussed in last week’s reading, The Language of New Media, the rectangular computer screen…
I looked forward to this week’s reading, about creating the website “Raid on Deerfield: the Many Stories of 1704,” because it connected the strands of my career to-date in academic, digital, and public history. When I took David Silverman’s Colonial North America seminar (syllabus in Microsoft Word format) in spring 2005, we read a scholarly…
The other night on my way to class, I found myself behind a truck with one of Virginia’s many custom license plates. But this one’s tagline intrigued me: “Farming since 1614.” As the pickup and I crawled down Lee Highway, I started to wonder, “Why 1614?”–particularly in light of Jamestown’s founding seven years before. As…
This week’s readings for Clio I got into basic nuts and bolts of disseminating history on the Web, particularly planning and design of websites. For me, they were quite useful as I think about putting my own projects on the Web. Some of the design principles discussed in the readings were familiar to me from…
During an unexpected trip to San Antonio this past week, I made a couple of pilgrimages to visit my former colleagues at the Alamo. I began my public history career there–indeed, discovered public history–when I was hired as a history interpreter during the summer of 2000. I repeated that role after I graduated from Pitt…