Taylor Masse

[tmasse397]

Final Response

At the beginning of the semester we were asked to make a Tumblr page. This was to be used as way for us to understand how a digital medium could be used in an academic form. I understand why Tumblr may have been chosen. There are many historical blogs that we have access to and many are divided by interest, so at least we can choose what we would prefer to read. One of the problems with this is that the sources used may or may not be creditable. As we have learned, this is a problem with digital history. Not only did we learn this by using Tumblr, but this was a reoccurring theme of the course that was examined in the Weller book, class discussion, and through our work with Wikipedia. It is my opinion that Tumblr was not the most useful tool to help us understand digital history.

  Throughout this class one of the other reoccurring themes was the battle between digital historians and traditional historians. I believe that I am more of a traditional historian. I am not a fan of using Tumblr in the academic realm. I have never used Tumblr before this class and I found the site very hard to use. Every time I would play around with the site I would just get frustrated and end up closing it down. My extreme dislike of this site often meant that I would I usually forget to check for assignments or other posts. This is very unfortunate because this was to be a part of our participation grade. I would have preferred to hand in hard copies of the responses to readings and such.

  I realize that digital history is progressing and in some ways that is beneficial to all historians. For example, accessibility is a great benefit. With many sources being digitized, people can gain access to sources from all over the world without leaving their own city. This is extremely helpful for students. We have access to a lot of articles and documents through the many databases on Leddy’s web page. My personal favourites are JSTOR and Historical Abstracts. The only downfall is that not everyone has access. The cost of using these resources is quite expensive and funding can be a huge issue, especially when it comes to what is being digitized.

  Overall, I found History on the Web to be a very interesting and eye-opening course. Before this course I thought that I was relatively tech-savvy, but I have learned that I am nowhere near where I thought I was. I have had difficulty with both Tumblr and the GIS – Building Stories websites. Regardless of my difficulties, I have gained a lot of useful knowledge about history and the digital realm. We have previously discussed how fast digital history is growing and I believe that this course would be very useful to first year students in order to help them with their understanding of digital sources. Digital history will not be going away any time, so we must be prepared to work with it, not against it.

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Here are all of the screenshots from my work on the Wikipedia project!

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Wikipedia Project on Carrie Chapman Catt.

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Response to Spatial History

1) What is the promise of Spatial History?

The promise of Spatial History is to use specific technology as a way to make history more creditable. The technology used is geographic information systems (GIS), which maps information and categorizes it into groups making it more convenient for historians to use. The historians can use these maps and graphs to understand past historical events; thus, allowing them to do better work with proper information.

2) What are the obstacles? The possible problems?

The obstacles and possible problems of Spatial History include: cost, inaccuracy, and discontent. GIS technology is very expensive. In order to create the program and train people to use this particular technology, there is a huge cost to pay out. Also, GIS technology requires precise information in order to work properly. Since the GIS is used for mapping, there has to be consistency with landscape boundaries. This is hard to maintain because developing land is always popping up and changing said boundaries. Finally, historians area used to using documents they can hold. By having them switch to using technology, they may not understand how to use it. This may cause them problems with their research.

3) How do these readings connect with the discussions we’ve had in class?

These readings connect with class discussions because they discuss how the Internet can be useful to historians, which is the theme of our class. As a class, we have previously discussed how costly it would be to change book, documents, and other resources into data on the web. We have also discussed how changing mediums could lead to the loss of information, making what is left less accurate. Lastly, we have discussed the issues that arise when trying to transform tradition historians into digital historians. Many historians may have difficulty adjusting to the technology; however, the switch can be very beneficial.

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Response to the First Reading

In Weller’s introduction, she highlights some issues with using the internet that may be problematic for traditional and digital historians. One of the issues she mentions is there is a great number of information now available to us that is constantly being updated, which makes it hard for historians to archive exact information. Another issue is that pretty much anyone can edit the information that is out there. Weller does not make specific connections to how gender and geography are problematic for historians use of the internet, so these are just personals views.

In the article by Noam Cohen, it stated that 13% of Wikipedia posts are created or edited by women. This does not particularly surprise me as historically women’s voices were not heard in academics. The article goes on to say that women are more likely to use more detail in their posts. I think that this could pose a problem because someone (possibly male) may think that a post is too long and edit it to condense the information. This would be seen as a problem for historians because they like having more detail to sort though. Some information may be cut that a historian would find helpful.

As far as geography, I think that the information out there is equally as bias as gender. The article on geotagging suggests that 84% of the geotagged articles are from North America or Europe. Often times this bias can be shown by the person editing the post. We are not acquiring nearly as much information on small countries like the ones in Africa. This would cause a problem for historians because they do not have enough information to help with their research. Again, these are just my personal opinions.

[tmasse397]

Tumblr is a microblogging service that has recently become one of the foremost social media sites on the Internet. If you're interested in learning how to use Tumblr but you don't know where to begin, simply follow the steps outlined in...

I thought that this might be helpful since it seems like a lot of people were not sure how to use tumblr,myself included.