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Speaking of Podcasts...

In case George Mason's Center for History and New Media isn't your home page, today the Center inaugurated the podcast, Digital Campus.  Digital Campus is a biweekly discussion on "how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums."

When is a photo not an artifact, but a design element?

Based on readings and discussion this week, it would seem that in visual representation, as in other realms, context is everything.  Is touching up a digital photo different from selectively editing historic text documents?  In document editing, the standard is minimal-to-no messing with the original.  Why?  In part, because it is important to know how people and individuals coped with spelling, punctuation, word usage at different times. We want to try to grasp their trains of thought, intellectual, cultural and emotional milieu. We definitely don't clean up prose to make writers look better or to standardize a document according to criteria not those of the author.

But we'll lift quotes for use in different contexts.   We'll reposition a handwritten statement into a word-processed version.  And we'll manipulate the form and flow of text for design projects.

Parallels exist between documents and photographs. Both are artifacts.  Regardless of condition, the content of original photographs provides a foundation for interpretive analysis.  If the provenance is known, e.g., whether the image has lain protected in an archive or willy-nilly in the bottom of a box in someone's damp attic, analysis of photographic technological processes and their effects over time has value as well.

But there are times and places when removing the blemishes of age, recoloring, and cropping serve a purpose.  It would just seem necessary to footnote that quite clearly.

Podcasting

This morning, NPR Morning Edition broadcast an interview with podcaster Rob Walch who manages podcast411, a website explaining, among many topics, who is podcasting, how to podcast, the basics of podcasts for consumers including "Flashing 12s."

This morning's discussion focused on whether money is to be made in podcasting.  The short answer is, no, not at this time for podcasters, but yes for those who provide the technology and publishing mechanisms for those podcasts.

How does this relate to digital history?  The top four podcasts, rated by hits, are educational.  As an example, the NPR story cited the highly-popular feed by Podcast Peer Award 2007 Finalist, Grammar Girl who recently discussed semicolons. Not usually a heart-stopper. Walsh pointed out that the broadcast made a dry subject interesting without sacrificing substance.  So we are back to design, or "packaging."  While we've recently discussed visual presentation, audio--soundtrack, lively scripts, etcetera--is a presentation element as well. 

Many museums already disseminate material through podcasts: Monticello is an excellent example of a variety of materials and approaches.  It seems to me, on first thoughts anyway, that podcasts offer another portal for disseminating "good" history and another gatekeeping methodology for quality control.  (Walch's website, by-the-way, categorizes 31 podcasts under history, some of which academic historians would undoubtedly question.)

Help, please:  I am having trouble with CSS in multiple browsers. I have clearly missed some basic information about how to negotiate this.  Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

"Do it yourself": challenging. "How To" websites: priceless

See http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Including, but not limited to  53 CSS techniques you couldn't live without

and

more than you ever though you'd want to know about rounded corners  

Question of the week...

To which level of Dante's inferno shall we consign Internet Explorer? 

The analogies between CSS and language learning increase.  Understanding before speaking, in most cases.  It IS making a bit more sense, but there's no fluency yet.  And thank heavens for cut-and-paste.  Modifying the works of others does, in fact, increase understanding of possibilities.  Things to learn (besides footnotes which are not yet in the text assignment): to think in three-columns; the advantages/disadvantages of non-static layout; cleaning up CSS; positioning, positioning, positioning...and more.

On Tufte.  It goes without saying (but I'm doing it anyway) that we are increasingly a visual culture--or at least,  text and image increasingly overlap and integrate in our daily lives. I never tire of the story of Dr. Snow and the use of spatial analysis or mapping to stem the London cholera epidemic.  What would Snow have done with today's mapping technologies? For historians, the accessibility of these technologies  offers the possibility of asking questions and giving visual answers to problems of change over time, the effect of social relationships, the correlation between space and event.--just to touch on a few really broad themes that historical geographers in particular, have discussed for decades. 

In  Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., ESRI, 2001) David Rumsfeld and Meredith Williams point to the changes in visual explanation that GIS allows, "GIS is breathing new life into historical maps by freeing them from the static confines of their original print form. ...When [a map] is converted into digital form, it can be manipulated and combined with other spatial data..."  (2, 3)

Effective visual explanation seems particularly important for exhibit curators in museums faced with the challenge of how to maximize the information that's presented within the confines of the three-dimensional exhibit space.  It's necessary to simply stop thinking "text" and ask how visual explanations consolidate, reinforce, and amplify the presentation of information. 

Bare Naked CSS

Subtitle:  where I am is not where I hope to be...

And yet, Professor Petrik's reminder to think structurally first made a little more sense in developing the type assignment this week, e.g., I built the basic page structure with CSS, placed that in the XHTML page, returned to the stylesheet to develop further components of the page. It's the method we've learned in class and the approach most textbooks seem to advocate, and suddenly, it made sense. (In unison:   "I TOLD YOU SO!")  I can now see how it leads to better design later, when and if the design capability develops.

Form follows function...

The type assignment for this week isn't finished.  It doesn't take advantage of a lot of the basic CSS we've discussed.  The masthead, for example, is a photoshop image rather than title and image properly aligned and floating.  The IE fix hasn't happened yet and so the page goes catywampus in Explorer. As of mid-morning, no footnotes yet  and no image caption either (best for last...)  Border colors were lifted from Professor Petrik's article on footnotes.

Visited font pages and downloaded one free one--Plowright (need to check  from where) which is part of a two-free-fonts-a-week the site offers.  Not bad, but it pixellates around the edges and, as a freebie, has no punctuation. 

Who do polyglot historians talk to?

There’s an aspect to toggling between past-ese and present-ese that the Polyglot Manifesto does not address.  Sepoy emphasizes that the polyglot "has to speak within and without the historic discipline—with colleagues in the Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Computer Sciences and…with the digital public."

However, he focuses on speaking to colleagues in computer science and within that discussion, he emphasizes the translation of text to web.  That’s one critical conversation, of course, but as wonderful and necessary as it is to have archives, e-books—the whole huge array of research resources—on the internet, it’s arguable whether that presence actually fosters greater public discourse or engagement.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason is working on an electronic archive of the Papers of the War Department 1784-1800.  After a presentation and demonstration of the amazing scope of the project at a brown bag lunch at the Center, discussion about the project jumped immediately to how to encourage user involvement with the documents—in other words, to adapt the concepts of both Pelikan and Gramsci—how to use the media of present-ese to engage the language of past-ese and how to foster organic intellectualism through processes of exchange and interaction.

It’s the public discourse with the objects of history (including text)  that our do-it-yourself technology also needs to foster.  Simply moving text to new media isn't enough, particularly because the web is not a passive medium and its users are not couch potatoes.  We have developed from utilizing its non-linearity to mediate our personal discourse with content to creating public conversation and communities.  YouTube and Flickr, and yes, Wikipedia,  and of course, blogs are obvious examples of different genres of the public dialog of which Ellen Lipton writes in D.I.Y: design it yourself.  So, it seems that an additional  component of present-ese for historians is consideration of when and how to speak with the digital public.

Notes on CSS readings:  On half of one em divided by three pixels equals fourteen pica which won't fly on internet explorer for windows, but it might for mac, but only if your monitor is broken.  Please refer to earlier blog post featuring Munch illustration, replace /div/div with font-size font-size font-size.  Actually, these readings are really helpful, although that may not be evident for quite a while.

I have not yet begun to fight...

Subtitled, CSS:  when thinking INSIDE the box is good.

What I HAVE learned this week:  very basic familiarity with what CSS is all about.  A sense of the relationship of various parts to the whole.

What I have NOT learned this week:  how to use those parts.  Essentially, I can now do about 25 percent of what I could do in tables, but not as well. 

What I have not DONE yet:  uploaded assignments, and that might not happen until after class tonight.  Comcast is momentarily recalcitrant.  A first attempt is up, which bears no similarity to the neatly-ordered, dramatically-colored divs comprising most CSS sites.  In fact, it's only a slight cut above web pages of say, 1993.   

What I look forward to:  starting from scratch on a new page.  This was a cut-paste-and-edit experience this week, perhaps similar to the modeling that helps learning a new language become more intuitive.

CSS, round one

I’m not fond of the personality of Wroblewski’s website,

But he does raise some interesting questions for the historian about web design. It strikes me that historians ought to be proficient at creating the “consistent and clear point of view” that Wroblewski defines as the unified experience comprising the personality of a web site. It’s one of the skills we study and train to do: state a coherent theme or thesis and provide evidentiary support.

In text-based scholarship, the more unified and consistent the relationships among text, images, typeface, and chapter, footnote, bibliographic organization, the better the publication (excellent content is an assumption here).  The more we're drawn to the cover of a book, for example, the more likely we are to take it off the shelf, and if the introductory sentence is provocative, the more likely we are to engage with the content. 

And if a book is about, say, World War I in Europe and the cover image fails to reflect the title or advertised content, a sense of the credibility of the publication is slim from the outset. And if the typeface is dense and difficult to follow and chapter headings vague, only the most dedicated reader or the author's mother is likely to pursue it.  So it seems, really, that there's a potential transference of meta-principles from text to hypertext, from linear format to the nonlinearity of the web—standards of excellence actually relevant to just about any design project in a variety of media.

Wroblewski addresses branding as a critical issue for commercial websites, particularly to create a competitive marketing edge.  But what does branding mean for educational web sites and those of museums and other public history venues?  It's unlikely Monticello will attract more visitors than George Washington's Mount Vernon because its website is more coherent and offers more interactivity and technological diversity.  Competition isn't the issue. Yet web sites are requisite outreach for public history venues and even for the smallest sites, they usually include educational outreach as well as basic visitor information. 

I particularly appreciated Wroblewski's discussion of color—I get stuck in black, white, gray and sepia and really like it, but  it lacks universal appeal.

Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig thoroughly discuss design and architectural issues for history in Digital History: A guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.

On Clio Web, Jeremy Boggs gives his take on the importance of web design and points to additional resources.