Week Eight: Digital Collections and Digital Preservation

This week much of class time was spent talking about Omeka. Prior to this class, I knew nothing about Omeka, never even heard of it. But after doing some reading about it, it seems like a very helpful resource not only for students, but for anyone who wants to visit a museum but doesn’t have the means to actually go there. 

One of the articles labels Omeka as “WordPress for museums” and as we know, WordPress is used for blogs that can be written about anything, a source academics are increasingly getting into. For history students in particular, Omeka can display a museums or library’s archives for students to look through, and these museums and libraries may be the only place these primary sources are located. Because this database is free for users, it provides people with a wealth of information that they wouldn’t be able to access any other way. 

Another one of the readings says Omeka has no competition. Many other sources we use for information such as MediaWiki and a library’s digital archives, such as CCSU’s archives, they don’t have the same ease of use that Omeka has. Not only that, but Omeka is like a combination of all these sites in one. Anyone can create one, but historians and librarians may not be interested in small town historical districts, so students (such as in our class) can go to these places and show others that these small places do exist and they have some interesting sites that may interest people.

The final article talks about something called Dublin Core. After reading it through, even I can’t completely understand it. Discussion of computer codes and metadata is something I have never been able to understand, so much of the article was completely foreign to me. I am sure some people would understand everything that it is talking about, but it has been the one field I can never understand, which is why Omeka seems so much easier to use and comprehend.

Omeka and other sites that are coming out are making finding sources and unknown historical places easier to access for students and regular people who are interested in these kinds of things. By using Omeka, people can even plan trips to go to some of these places and learn something new, even if it is a place in their own town, Omeka makes it known to those who may not know about it otherwise. Because of this class, several new places will be added to Omeka and people will become more aware of these places. For example, for my project I am researching the historical section of the town of Southington, when most people think of this part of town, they instantly think of the annual Apple Harvest Festival, they don’t think of the several war memorials that are located there. By doing this project, people will realize there is more to the center of town than just a festival, it is a place where history has occurred and where we honor the people who were a part of that history, and then they start to see their own hometown in a totally new way. 

Week Seven: Finding, Building, and Using your Audience

The topic for this week has been getting yourself noticed on the internet; building your fanbase and followers by getting your information out there for people to find. I think part of how popular you get on the social networking sites, like WordPress and Twitter, is how you present yourself. Not everyone wants to read research papers filled with words and phrases they don’t understand. They want to read things that interest them, and academia is not something that interest everyone. For example, in addition to my account here on WordPress, I also have an account on a website called Fanfiction.net. On WordPress, my blog is used solely for the digital history class, but my Fanfiction account is where I write fictional stories based on video games, books, anime, whatever I want. Over the years that I have had my fanfiction account, I have built a loyal group of followers, many of whom can’t wait for the next chapter of my stories. If I were to have posted my research papers on the site, I doubt I would have gotten the large audience I have now. What you present is just as important as how you present it. If you are trying to make it deep and complicated, chances are you won’t have many followers. Make it easy to comprehend, and your audience will probably grow, and you may even get people interested in new topics they had never heard of before. 

With the creation of tags, several different search engines, and commands like CtrlF, we can easily find things we are interested in. Using these tools are invaluable for history students as we have all learned. We can find several sources within a few seconds, something that would take hours in a library. These tools are also used by everyday people searching for something they have an interest in. By attaching tags to something you post, like a research paper or something you wrote up for no reason, you can attract a wide range of people when they search for a specific tag. Using just this one tools can attract a much wider audience then you would normally get without it. Not only that, but well-known and popular scholars use social networks like Twitter to get the word out of a new book they wrote or article that was printed in a magazine, so even if they retired or left their field for some reason, they can still continue getting their work out to people who followed their research before they decided to retire or take a break. All these websites and tools have become very helpful in terms of history. Not just history of course, but all branches of academics.

A feature on Fanfiction.net that I love most, is the comment feature. By getting feedback on my stories I can see what people are liking about my stories and what they want me to change. I take all comments into consideration and change my stories accordingly. When I read the positive comments, I feel like I am really doing my job right, and feel accomplished as a writer. By using the audience, I feel I am becoming a better writer, and without the power of Web 2.0, I would always be doubting my writing skills, and one thing a writer should never do is doubt his or her writing skills. Not everyone is going to like what you write or like what you have to say, but as long as you are happy with what you wrote, that is all that matters. However, it is always helpful to have other opinions to make things better; why do you think professors always want to have individual meeting with their students when they have to write a big research paper? The internet is the same way, the audience can give invaluable advice, which is why I am always open to comments and opinions from my readers, I want to make sure I am writing something they enjoy reading but also something I am proud of writing. I have been happy with all my blogs so far on WordPress and even if I get negative comments, I will be happy with what I wrote.

Week 6: Digitization, Copyright, Intellectual Property

This week the readings for class were all about making information free on the internet, should academic information be free on the internet or not? Truth be told, I never looked at it this way before. Prior to college I had no idea databases like JSTOR existed and had all this information. I also didn’t know schools had to pay for access to the contents, I had just been taught in my classes how to access it and search for whatever I needed. I never had any clue that my tuition pretty much helped the school pay for their access to all this information. I was pretty shocked when I first learned JSTOR was not free for everyone outside of the school to use, I had been taking it for granted. So because of this, the topic that interested me the most this week was learning about the Aaron Swartz case.

I have always been interested in reading about legal cases, but this one was different to me. The other cases I had studied were  normally well-known cases that everyone knew about, but I had never heard about this case. Again, I never knew some of the databases I had been using were accessible only because I was going to school, so naturally I had no idea a legal battle over it was ever going on. Aaron Swartz was being charged with several charges because of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and downloaded several documents off JSTOR to put on information sharing websites like The Pirate Bay so these documents could be available to everyone. At first I was thinking “What’s the big deal? It’s just some documents from a database everyone can access.” But then I realized that it was free for me to access because I was in a school that paid for access to the site for the students. After I realized that, I started thinking about the question “Was Aaron Swartz stealing?” 

From a legal standpoint, he was stealing; but in my opinion I don’t see it as stealing. Swartz was an activist for information being free in the public domain, so he saw it as just doing what he was fighting to achieve. I may be on his side because I believe this information should be free. Why not? There are several people who may be interested in reading some of this material, but don’t feel they should have to pay for it, and I agree. Once I graduate school chances are I won’t pay JSTOR just so I can continue accessing their documents. There are plenty of other sites that have documents on information I may be looking for and I don’t have to pay for it. So in my opinion, I don’t think he was stealing, but I can see why MIT brought charges against Swartz, but in the end, it may have been these charges that pushed him to end his life. 

I don’t consider myself an activist for free information on the internet like Swartz was, but I do believe much of it should be. Why should people have to pay for information they are interested in reading? I just don’t think it is fair to make people pay for it when many of them may not have the extra money to afford it, or there is just one document they need, it just doesn’t seem right to me. I think it was wrong for the government to push charges against Swartz for his actions on JSTOR, especially when JSTOR didn’t push charges and they were the ones who had their documents stolen, so why did the government push so hard to convict him? A lot of this doesn’t seem fair to me, but like many other things, there isn’t anything that can really be done to change it.

Week Five: Changing Scholarship

The question for this weeks blog is how does the Internet impact how historical research is done, and for this question I looked at the Connected Histories website. This website contains many historical documents about Britain, mostly early modern and nineteenth century. What makes it really helpful for students is that you are able to create your own kind of workspace on the site by saving the documents you find, as well as being able to share them with others. 

Switching gears now to answer the question, how do websites like this impact our research of history? Well, personally, the internet has been a very helpful tool in my own research. I have spent hours combing through digital sources and archives, collecting information for the many research papers during my time at CCSU. Sometimes it has been more of a headache than helpful to me. Many newspaper websites I have used will just show me a small little article that contains the keyword I was searching for but it may not show the entire article. Or I may want to see the entire page of the newspaper but it doesn’t show me that either. So in some ways the internet is not the best way to get all the primary sources you need. I prefer using it for secondary sources. Many books and journals are being put online as well as the actual physical copies, but looking at them online could be faster and easier. If you are searching a large textbook for just a few chapters of helpful information for your paper, it is so much faster to just search for a few keywords than skimming the entire book trying to find what you need. I have done this method myself several times and it can be a real time saver.

Although searching online can be so much easier to find information, there are still some traditional methods I prefer using, mostly to find primary sources. I have had to do assignments for other classes that required me to go to the library archives and search the old books or magazine collections to find the information we were looking for; and I usually ended up collection pages and pages full of notes. Sometimes the stuff that is online isn’t the only way to get some really interesting information. My favorite place to look was in the old Time magazines from the World War II era and see what was being said about the war and what people were writing in about; it was getting both a printed source and the opinions of the people as well. Looking at old documents like that in their physical forms can turn up a wealth of information you may not have been able to find otherwise either because it hasn’t been added to the digital archives yet, or it may never end up there for some reason.

The website I looked at, Connected Histories, is very interesting because it has information about a place that I haven’t researched much, but their collections sound very interesting, especially the one about the witches in early modern England. I love studying the history of witches and witchcraft so this collection really jumped out at me. One thing I don’t like is you can’t seem to really browse through the collections, you have to search keywords within the collection to find sources, which can limit what you find. Overall, the internet can be an extremely valuable source, giving access to information you wouldn’t be able to have found otherwise, but sometimes you can only get the information you are looking for in its original form, and sometimes find even more information you weren’t expecting to find.