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November 14th Readings

How do academics use the internet for historical reasearch: Academics use the internet for several diverse functions that enhance their research capabilities. The vast amount of sources available online as opposed to in person provide the academic with much more research information. Furthermore, the internet allows the historian to easily search for the context behind their scholarly research. For example in "Googling the Victorians" by Patrick Leary, he refers to an issue in which he did not understand the meaning of a political cartoon. Using smart search parameters and the sentence he did not understand he was able to find the meaning online. What makes this so valuable is the fact that the context behind it was so obscure he would have never come across it searching through related academic works in the library. How do historians teach history using the internet: Historians have recently began using the internet to teach. Initially they only took the position of never touching Wikipedia. Now professors often encourage students to search for pertinent news articles etc. on the internet. In addition, more abstract and forward thinking courses have begun to emerge. Notably, the History on the Web course offered at the University of Windsor. Not only does it encourage students to study and understand history through the use of the internet, it integrates the students into the creation of historical work on the internet. What is the connection between the library and the internet: The main connection between the library and the internet is the concept of the preservation of historical sources. The library aims to hold and maintain physical copies of important works for future scholarship. Whereas the internet seemingly holds a vast amount of information, some academic but mainly non-academic. The issue the internet encounters is the exact same as the library. While the library is plagued by the archiving of out-dated technology (microfilm etc.) and deciding what works to store, the internet faces the issue of backwards compatibility and overwhelming amounts of data. Librarians and archivists alike attempt to maintain and preserve what they believe to be most important in both situations. Thankfully, librarians need not worry about thousands of physical sources magically disappearing with the loss of a server or the integration of new software. Question: Do you believe that there is a valid concern of the loss of historically important sources warranting the creation of stable URL depositories aiming to preserve the content. If so, what sources would be worthy of preserving and why? If not, what issues or social conditions prevent it. Also have to give props to the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 for using a picture of a raid boss from World of Warcraft.

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Twitter Assignment Analysis

The Twitter Assignment was a rather unique way of researching history. Initially I expected it to be a lot simpler to find interesting sources since as a historian the most difficult aspect of research is locating enough pertinent sources. Unfortunately, the vast amount of tweets on my subject filled my search with unintelligible commentary and hundreds of tweets referring to the same event in nearly the exact wording. This highlighted the two major issue of the internet as a source, their is perhaps too much information to get a proper sample of and very little of it is peer reviewed or reliable. In order to properly study the course of an event the historian must be able to build a narrative with the resources available. In this case, looking past the inherent bias that every source holds is extremely difficult when using Twitter as a source. Tweets regarding politics seem to be the most personally influenced writting I have ever encountered, due to this it is difficult to properly gain a proper understanding of the events when two completely different opinions are consistently being presented. The most surprising revelation I encountered while doing the assignment was how much of a role Twitter plays in today's mainstream media. In my case, not only did Tweets get used during the process of the debate but were then used by multiple prominent newspapers and websites in their debate recaps. This finding was representative of my sources used that discussed social media and it's role in journalism, which studied the increasing presence of social media as a primary source. I found the assignment to quite insightful in terms of how history should be studied. Throughout the course of my education I have consistently encountered the issue of not having access to, or a lack of, relevant sources. For this assignment I expected to quickly find all one hundred sources, but surfing through the useless tweets to find valuable tweets took possibly more effort than intensely researching a topic. Along the same lines, the search function that Twitter uses would initially seem to aid finding relevant tweets but often doesn't. During my research, using the #debate as a search parameter I encountered a massive amount of tweets about a man who simply asked a question during the debate. The internet had quickly latched on to this figure due to his humorous qualities and as a result diluted the pool of relevant sources in the #debate search.

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Twitter Assignment: I have decided to do my twitter assignment on the most recent political debate between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. The bulk of the tweets were based on personal opinions as to who "won" the debate, as expected. Though there is a massive amount of tweets on several unusual occurences including Trump's demeanor, the controversial topics and twitter's so called american hero "Ken Bone". The debate was controversial because both parties were unprofessional, mainly Trump, and rarely focused on important debate topics and politics. The twitter highlights focus on Trump's sniffling during Hilary's allotted speaking time and the threatening way he hovered around her. The political purpose of the debate was further dimished by the glorification of Ken Bone, one of the audience selected to ask a question. While he did ask a question that was rather important, he gained fame for his vibrant red sweater. In fact, he gained more social media traction after the debate than the candidates.

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My group chose to do research on Amherstburg. The vast majority of historical sites there have ties to the war of 1812 so I chose to differentiate a bit and found the Nazrey African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is historically significant due to its heavy ties with the Underground Railroad movement during the mid eighteenth century. The building itself was built in 1848 by refugees and named after Bishop Nazrey. Today, the church has been merged with the North American Black Historical Museum. The building was given Heritage Designation by the Federal government in 1998 under the Historic Sites and Monuments Act.

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397 Readings week 2

I chose to look at the French Revolution on wikipedia. While initially you would think it remains a rather normal topic, this is true on the english page and not the french page. Both versions of the page highly corresponded with Rozenweig’s “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past” and Graham’s geotagging articles. The topic is based on European history, and has a large following from both the english/north American aspect as well as the French/European. There were no clear indications of gender within the talk section. The English version of the page used mostly Encyclopedia references along with many academic journals. While Encyplodias tend to be easily accessible, as we learned from Rozenweig’s article, encyclopedias are liable to have several flaws in addition to biases. Academic journals are troublesome due to the fact that they are often not easily accessible and inherit the point of view of the author. I also found it interesting that there were three french sources, used in the english page but no english sources used on the french page. The French page had a large variety of sources, from volumes based solely on the history of the french revolution to theses and primary sources. While the use of primary sources would normally be a positive, in this case the readers must be very careful as the revolutionaries were happy to influence the masses with false information. The French page and its sources contain much more bias than that of the English mainly due to the distaste for the Aristocracy. Futhermore, the controversy behind certain radical players in the revolution such as Robespierre was a large facet for biases. There was very little activity in the talk section for the english page, in fact only two sections, but one of the two was a slightly heated debate between two parties. There was hardly any editing and was mainly for new information, fixing grammar and formatting. On the other hand, the french talk page was composed of mainly suggestions toward both grammar and information but did contain several disagreements. The editing section of the french page spanned pages, showing 500 results only went back three years when the original post was in 2006. A massive amount of edit wars occured, a moderator along with a bot corrected so many troll edits that they begun banning posters. The majority of the revoked edits were aimed at insulting the momarchy and its practices, two fine examples from the first page being a reference to “le caca à la palace” (the shit at the palace) and “ils sont tous des canards!!!” (they’re all ducks). The editing hit such a level that the bot could not keep up easily and as of January this year revoked posting privileges due to excessive vandalism of the page.

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Introduction & Image Explination

I chose to use an image that is an anime characterization of Joseph Stalin. The reason that I chose the image is because this is history course revolving around the integration of history on the web, the image is an unusual cross between an important historical figure and a popular internet art style. It shows a non traditional viewpoint on the subject, and would widely be considered controversial. This image conveys my personality due to the fact that it is unusual and humorous while reflecting my interest in both history and manga.

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