I just completed a fabulous class where we explored the intersection between historical fiction and “traditional” history. Not surprisingly, we did not come up with  ironclad rules dividing the two, but the struggle to find clarity  between the real and imagined was both exciting and worthwhile. And the reading list? What every history-loving graduate student in English hopes for:

Simon Schama, Dead Certainties/Unwarranted Speculations

Simon Baker, Ancient Rome

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Thomas More: Utopia

Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More

Connie Willis: Doomsday Book

John Aberth, The Black Death

Jean Plaidy: The Captive Queen of Scots

John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

Women’s Captivity Narratives

John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive

With a semester-long clash between history and fiction playing in my head, I was immediately captivated when I heard this NPR report on a new game, LA Noire. Another excellent  merging of genres–game meets film, Los Angeles in the 1940s is brought to life, historical photographs and maps are married by advanced technology, period diners reign supreme! Now if I could just meander around the re-created 1940s Los Angeles and sightsee instead of solving murders…

For another novel approach to the city, consider a  walking tour hosted by the Los Angeles Conservancy. You too could see the sights from the top of City Hall.

Enrollment in our Digital Humanities class has been an adventure. Now when I am online, I am newly aware of a whole backdrop that has always been there, but I have been heedless of. No longer! Although I do recognize that I have just removed one layer of oblivion and have MANY more to work through.

This week, an email from LinkedIn containing Higher Education highlights featured a link to a Professor Hacker article by Brian Croxall titled Zotero vs. Endnote in the “Chronicle.” What stuck me when reading this article and the comments following was all of the topics it raised that we have discussed in class: personal preference, familiarity, synching, magic, patience, code, collaboration, open access, the list goes on. . . . And it all made sense.

Next, I searched for “Zotero” in the Chronicle- 87 results. This high number would have surprised me in February when the semester began. Not today.

Finally, I found a post by Amy Cavender that suggested that the Readability function might make sites more Zotero compatible- maybe this will help solve our class puzzle! She also wrote “Getting Started with Zotero” (there is a part II as well). I am grateful for all of the help out there as this journey continues without the support of our fearless and entertaining leader.

Two weeks ago at the bottom of my post, Trends, I began to explore the issues of self-publishing in a most elementary fashion.  Stephen Ramsay’s Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (part two) and the extensive comments following his post explosively catapult this conversation into the academic realm–worthy of  serious consideration and a good model of healthy debate. And just so the central contributers seem real (think Velveteen Rabbit):

Stephen Ramsay

VS.

Don’t miss the very cool NINES Project: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online that Dr. Stauffer directs and the Center for Digital Research where Dr. Ramsay is a Fellow.

The transformations that Walter Breuning witnessed in his 114 years are staggering, yet he remained staunchly pr0-change. His life story provides opportunity for reflection about Cronon’s comments on neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Of course, quick highlights of his long life do not fully capture his foibles and challenges, but to come around to valuing communication and kindness to others seems to me a good  measure of a life. And, note that the link above is to the Huffington Post version of this story- we talked about her new technological venue in class.

This week our task is to to explore and reflect on the nature of the web — the digital — as an open forum for knowledge production, communication, and consumption.

A Few Interesting Finds Along the Way:

I. Digital Debate

The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not.

II. Developing World Access to Leading Research

The demand for scientific literature in developing countries had gone unfulfilled for many years with thousands of students, researchers and academics struggling to gain access to current scientific information. While students were unable to access the literature and acquire the knowledge they needed, researchers and academics were confronted with mounting difficulties in publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals, updating their teaching curricula and identifying funding.

The collective name for three programmes – HINARI, AGORA and OARE – Research4Life provides developing countries with free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online. Eligible libraries and their users benefit from:

• Online access to over 8100 peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books, and databases
• Full-text articles which can be downloaded for saving, printing or reading on screen
• Searching by keyword, subject, author or language
• Resources available in several languages
• Training in information literacy and promotional support

III. Commercial Photo Abuse from a Flicker Photo?

Puts our class discussion and building project related to Creative Commons licenses into a more clear perspective:

N. Cohen Technology Report in the NY Times in 2007

Virgin Mobile Ad from report- the comment section neatly covers our class content

IV.   Free Civil War subscriptions and related apps at the itunes store.

The possibilities for teaching with these materials are really quite staggering.

At the end of Harry Roberts article about typography he listed three  sample websites worthy of note for their beauty. The second,  Khoi Vinh’s has a plethora of categories about an incredible variety of subjects (including 299 post on technology). It is worth a tour in light of the “Hacking the CV” post. Here is a funny, class-related post on typesetting. The comments are interesting. From Vinh’s post I linked to a quirky photo display called “Back to the Future.” I don’t think it is just the late hour that makes it entertaining. The gallery “Little Schools in the Andes” deserves a click  for more serious purposes too.

I am mid-paper, writing about education in New England in the antebellum period and the confusing whirl between the “common school movement” that advocated the importance of access to education regardless of socioeconomic as a tool for advancing the moral, social, and economic of the nation and the reality for free black children who were often (mostly) not welcome at local schools. The novel, Our Nig, by Harriett Wilson is the center of this discussion.

While the topic of education itself is directly related to our subject of technology, Wilson also offers an incredibly early example of a relatively new trend, self-publishing. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig was printed in 1859. It received practically no public attention until its rediscovery and republication in 1983. Occluded by the status of the author and the passage of time, the mystery surrounding this important novel, the first published by an African American woman and the first to be published by a black writer in the United States, only added to the warm reception it received when Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. launched its notable twentieth-century debut. Because there has not been a single comment uncovered about the release of this novel from the 1800s, there is no conclusive evidence proving why this text was ignored. It is easy to conjecture that Wilson’s subject matter made pretty much any member of the antebellum audience uncomfortable. She wrote about the taboo topics of miscegenation, abolitionist racism, con artists posing as escaped slaves making money on the lecture circuit, and physical torture perpetuated by those purporting Christianity. Eric Gardner did try to plug the holes by conducting an extensive study of ownership history of the thirty-four remaining first editions he could trace. In his chapter of Harriett Wilson’s New England, he concludes “exactly where Our Nig falls on a spectrum between a radical novel suppressed by part of the abolitionist power structure and a book charitably produced for the author’s personal distribution remains unclear” (244).

Statue of Harriet Wilson and her son George in Milford, New Hampshire

I could go on and on about this novel, but I won’t! Here is more if you are interested:

Harriet Wilson Project

Teaching Guide for Harriet Wilson

Account of the Noyes Academy, a school razed in 1835 from “The Liberator”

Connection to interview with Dr. Gates on the rediscovery of this novel

There has been a lot of recent media attention on the questionable future of the printed book. Simultaneously, there has been rising trend in self-publishing with a plethora of websites available to publish your own work in as few as two days.   Interesting in light of our class discussions- is this an example of an unleashing of intellectual freedom for all through technology  or just an opportunity for the teeming masses to share mundane thoughts? As usual, the “truth” probably lies somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, I am struck by the similarity in tone between the 19th century rhetoric about access to education in my opening paragraph and the open access movement in the digital world. While, I know we are a long way from perfection in our current educational system,  I would argue that we have made undeniable progress in educational opportunity in the US that could serve as a positive model as we advocate for world-wide access to knowledge.

Yesterday I went to a national conference focused on implementing community and active learning in the college freshmen seminar using a learning system, “On Course.” One of the sessions was on a study by a Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck that considers enthusiastic learning, educational persistence, and performance.When I got home I found a podcast on NPR’s Tech nation (link on the home page of her website above) and on Chi Conversations, featuring Dr. Dweck . Technology is EVERYWHERE– in varying states of quality and of ability to compel!

It was a good moment because her theory applies directly to my challenges with technology! Somehow, in the passing week I managed to lose the basic tools I needed to edit my practice exercise.  Reading every required  word, taking good notes and paying attention in class weren’t enough this this round.  I could moan or cry or quit or… But instead, I’ll try to remember that it is natural to struggle when learning, setbacks are inevitable, and persistence does pay off.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow”

"Just thinkin' about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs"

And, I’m lucky to live with  a perfect stand in for Annie’s furry friend who really does not mind my moments of technological confusion!

The second article, “The History of the Internet and the Web, and the Evolution of Web Standards” in this week’s reading  of the Web Standards Curriculum begins with a quote from a blessedly familiar Victorian friend:

"Begin at the Beginning"

Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?

Begin at the beginning, the King said gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

by Lewis Carroll,  who was both a mathematician and author

By now, you are not surprised at my word-beleaguered brain anchoring to literature in the rather daunting presence of the world of  wireframes, HTML, the div and span, CSS, JavaScript, compliance, block level and inline elements, doctype, switching and rending modes…

For emphasis, here is a word map from the THINKMAP Visual Thesaurus on my personal word of the day:

Who Knew?

With the comfort of mundane words set aside, here is some technical learning  from the simple post above:

• Instead of dragging the images into this post, I uploaded them so that I could include text for those who can’t easily access images. Yes, easy to do, but I wouldn’t have thought about why this is important without our reading
• I sent the word map above to my email from the free trial site on the web, put it on my desktop and then inserted it above- pretty complex if you think of all of the steps others took that made it simple for me
• I may not have appreciated word maps in all of their glory without this class
• This is an unordered list- powerful
• I tried to cut and paste a definition list from the OED (“beleaguer,” surprise) into this post, but it was too messy formatting wise and I sort of understand why
• WordPress is genius- all of these features that I can use as if by magic (read no writing HTML)
• The decidedly clever author of article number two, “The History of the Internet and the Web…” whose name is Mark Norman Francis misspelled “Carroll” which will provide great comfort when I make typing mistakes writing very basic code
• Inspiration from article one: “The Web Standards Curriculum, a course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are—it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge” WOW.

Allegorical choice of the week:

To Dash About or Behave in a Bad-tempered Manner?

Thanks to the postponement of reading about CSS, I will be able to stay in the camp of the White Rabbit- a relief to my family and colleagues.