The Confluence of Digital Media and History

For my final project, I'd like to create a story map. Initially I was floundering on what exactly I would represent, but I've since latched on to one of Professor Evans' ideas, a map of WWI military installations in Virginia. As a military brat, I have a special affinity for military installations, having lived on them the first 18 years of my life. I've done some research into the actual sites of the installations ( here and here seem like good places to start), but have spent more time deciding which platform to use to create my story map. During college I became adept at using Prezi, and consider that platform a contender for this project. In the below video you can see some of the ways in which Prezi can be used to create a story map -- and it has the added ability to make things look visually complex in layers of text and graphics. Of course I've also been looking into what ArcGIS can offer -- the gallery is a particularly useful place to start. The ...

The chapters out of this unit were especially helpful for editing the design of my blog. In the past several units I've struggled with editing the text in a post so that it will show up as intended. Often while writing in Blogger I'll have to "preview" a post multiple times to create a successful post. Using the "compose" functionality of Blogger can be more trouble than it's worth, so I've tried switching between the HTML and compose functions with some success. Once I've completed a post, I then have to change the font to white and highlight to black to create the correct contrast in the blog. If not, the results are less than satisfactory:  Initially I chose the black background and white text color scheme for greater contrast, but in the process I limited my creative options. To update my blog for this unit, I've decided to: Change the color theme to remove the need to edit the color of text Include color images as...

In chronological order from earliest to most recent, I believe the website order should be something like the below:  The Avalon Project American Memory   Dickinson Electronic Archive   Romantic Circles Amiens Cathedral Project Persepolis: A Virtual Reconstruction   Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Hawthorne in Salem The April 16 Archive   In Our Path   Digital Karnak Eye Level Life Outtacontext Oyez   Lascaux Part of the issue of chronologically sorting websites by their overall look -- some of the older looking ones were created more recently! For example, the Avalon Project website lists a copyright of 2008. The website doesn't have some of the main aspects we've come to expect in websites today (clean design, useful navigation, seamless interactivity) because the website was built for a single purpose -- to house transcripts of documents relating to law, history and diplomacy, beginning around 4000 BCE. As was discussed...

In searching on Google for a wide range of history blogs to compare and contrast, I first noticed that the search “history blogs” would get me nowhere. As mentioned in the last reading, there are so many blogs on the internet today that finding a credible authority on a specific topic can take some serious digging. Another issue with the world of blogs – how best to distinguish which are truly active? In searching I’ve found several that I would read, only to find out that they stopped posting abruptly several years ago. Depending on the audience, it is conceivable that a person could stop posting one day if only their mother and next door neighbor’s cat were avid readers. The size of the audience could also dictate the amount of effort an author is willing to put into posts. If the poster isn’t relying on the blog for monetary gain or fame, it would be much easier to pack it up when it got boring. I am interested in a wide range of historical topics, but most often local history ...

The Rosenzweig reading provided a wealth of information, especially for an introduction, but I found the information very useful as a framework for the book and for this class. Several points stuck out to me while reading, first and foremost the "seven qualities of digital media and networks that potentially allow us to do things better: capacity, accessibility, flexibility, diversity, manipulability, interactivity, and hypertextuality (or nonlinearity)." Of these seven, capacity, accessibility, and interactivity were the most interesting to me. I enjoyed the questions posed in the capacity section -- "why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?" There is an overwhelming amount of information on the web today, as well as data stored about our daily moves and actions. What will this information mean to future historians? It seems to me t...