PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

History 404 Spring 2014

Professor Alinder

UNIT 4 FEB 24-MARCH 3RD

PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: BLOGS, GOOGLE, YOUTUBE, & TWITTER

Make sure you have completed the readings/viewings for this unit before you begin reading this blog post:

● T. Mills Kelly, “Finding: Search Engine-Dependent Learning,” Chapter 2 in

Teaching History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ of Michigan Press,

2013):http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dh/12146032.0001.001/1:6/--teaching-history-in-the-digitalage?

g=dculture;rgn=div1;view=fulltext;xc=1

● Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic, July 2008

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

● “Daily Report: Google's Scanning of Books for Search Upheld by Court,” New

York Times, Nov 15, 2013: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/daily-report-googlesscanning-

of-books-for-search-upheld-by-court/?smid=pl-share

● Judge’s Ruling on Google Books case:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/834877-google-books-ruling-on-fair-use.html

● Geoffrey Nunberg, "Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," Chronicle of

Higher Education, Aug. 31, 2009. http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-

A/48245/

● Matt Raymond, “How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive, April

14, 2010, ,” (plus read the comments) http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-islibrary-

acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

● Update on the Twitter Archive At the Library of Congress, January 2013:

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/files/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf

● Kenning, “Bringing Historical Order to Youtube,” Posted on January 13, 2011 by

tkenning http://www.dighist.org/2011/01/bringing-historical-order-to-youtube/

● Lecture: Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Viewing/Browsing/Listening:

● You Tube Time Machine, http://yttm.tv

● Michael Wesch, “An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube,”

http://mediatedcultures.net/mediatedculture.htm

● On the Media, “Net Neutrality and You,” Friday, January 17, 2014

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/end-net-neutrality/

● Virtual Field Trips on Google +: http://youtu.be/GDwEjqkgwyI

● Tweeting the Civil War: https://twitter.com/CivilWarwp/tweeting-the-civil-war

Hello world! I have never blogged before, but it took me less than a minute to set up this blog thanks to Google Drive and couldn't be much easier. I thought about trying to deliver this lecture via Twitter, but the Library of Congress has enough to deal with without worrying about this class. I also considered a vlog, but I'm not quite ready for primetime (does anyone remember SNL that far back?) So the best alternative given this unit's topics is to blog. And I think you can tell from my tone, that blogs encourage a kind of informal writing. A style that as an historian I was neither trained in and nor encouraged to share...in public. I might use a diary as a primary source to better understand an everyday life, but I wasn't suppose to author one.

Why might blogs be an important tool for historians? I think you are getting some idea from reading the posts of Professor T. Mills Kelly in his Edwired blog. Dr. Kelly uses Edwired to discuss issues related to pedagogy and digital history, and he does this in a conversational tone. So conversational that most of the time any reader can comment. His latest post has the comments turned off because he had been invaded by spam, but if you read back posts you can see various readers respond to what he has written. 

Remember the google doc lecture when I discussed the academic publishing process? That process is the opposite of blogging. In other words, before any words are printed in an academic book or peer-reviewed article, those words go through a lengthy vetting process and it takes months, but usually years between the time I write and the book/article is read by the public. Blogging gives historians (and others) the chance to try out ideas, express thoughts, and relay experiences immediately, with the potential of feedback. 

Does the same go for Twitter? Why might Twitter be useful to historians?  Did you notice the right-hand corner of Edwired? That is Dr. Kelly's Twitter feed. I didn't really understand how Twitter could help historians until I attended a THAT Camp in 2012. THAT in THAT Camp stands for The Humanities and Technology. http://thatcamp.org

THAT Camps are run out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason and they are styled as "un-conferences," which means that everyone who attends decides what the topics of the camp will be when they all arrive. No one prepares a lengthy academic paper. Folks are there to learn new digital skills and ideas. A THAT Camp is coming to Milwaukee in May. If you are around, I highly recommend that you attend. Here is the info: http://milwaukee2014.thatcamp.org

THAT Camp uses Twitter to connect campers, share resources, and communicate with folks who can't be there in person. For History, I would say that Twitter is most useful for live updates during presentations and conferences. It's sort of like an academic's play by play commentary...with links to more sources.

So about that vlog I thought I would try? I'll let you all tell me what you think about YouTube and Dr. Wesch's analysis of it in your discussion posts. Let me just say (and I can't pretend that I am not ashamed) that my five year old daughter loves you tube. She has somehow managed to find and grown to love an entire genre of you tube videos known as toy reviews. That's right, she spends time watching other people describe, critique, and play with toys. Why is this of interest to her? I have no idea. But she is now at the point where she wants me to film her reviewing toys so she can have her own you tube channel. We'll see about that. But how does a five year old, with access to an iPad and wifi at home granted, find these channels in the first place? She can't read...yet... My older daughter who will turn 13 in July is dying to get her first Facebook account. She's been using Snapchat and other social media apps that don't have age requirements, but it's not the same...right?

What is the power of social media? I was told last week by a colleague that young people are no longer interested in Facebook. That may be true (except for 12 year olds). I've been on Facebook for only a couple of years and am young enough to be friends with my mother and old enough to wish that she tuned into my profile a little more often than she does (thanks mom!) But what is most interesting to me about facebook, beyond reconnecting with acquaintances I may or may not have every wanted to speak with again, is the potential to reach larger groups, friends of friends, and so on and so on. Let me give you an example. My book was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2009: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/85knr3dc9780252033988.html

A typical academic monograph might have a print run of maybe 1,000 copies, several of which the author will buy herself if I am any indication. Sure many of those copies will end up in libraries that could serve multiple readers, but in truth most academic books have very limited audiences. Want to learn more about publishing? http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html

In my spare time, I support public schools in Milwaukee as a parent with two kids in MPS. So one day I go into my daughter's kindergarten class to help out with standardized testing and was quite taken aback by the process. I went home and relatively quickly wrote a brief essay describing my morning in her classroom. I did not submit this essay for peer review, and I didn't have to because my plan was to "publish" is on a group facebook page. I did that and guess what happened? People read it, and shared it, and commented on it. After a week or so my post had been viewed over 19,400 times. Now this isn't anything compared to you Blex, but for me this is a huge audience. A much bigger readership than my book which took me 10 years to write will ever receive. That doesn't mean I'm quitting my day job. What it does mean is that Historians and other professional writers should take advantage of the readership out there that social media can connect them with.  And now it seems that my facebook post on testing is getting picked up by bloggers and those blogs get picked up by online newspapers. This is a little scary given that they are quoting someone (me) from facebook. And some of you thought Wikipedia wasn't a legitimate source. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/last-parent-resistance-collective-standardized-tests

Okay this blog post is getting long and some of the rules I imagine I should be following are to keep it conversational and keep it short. So one last issue to bring up: Metadata. What does Dr. Kelly say about Metadata? "In an era of keyword searching, the Library of Congress subject classifications are but one of many ways to dig around in databases, and so it is now already high time to teach history students about metadata—what it is, how it works, how it governs searching, what the Dublin Core is, and so on.[17]"

So what is metadata? I'm pretty sure that our SOIS student Elizabeth Young knows...
Should I check Wikipedia for the definition? Dare me?

Naturally, when I googled "metadata" Wikipedia comes up first in a long line of 33.5 million results (remember we are in the era of abundance). Let's break up the word. What does meta mean? According to Urban Dictionary, it means self-referential. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meta 

What? Urban Dictionary is not a good source? Okay let's look up metadata from the website of the Society of American Archivists: http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/m/metadata

Much better. Essentially metadata is the data or terms we use to describe other data--the terms we use to tag documents so that they can be indexed and accessed. The better the metadata the easier it is to find what you want to find. Most metadata resides in the background and isn't something that readers or viewers are aware of. But you can imagine that metadata consistency might be an important issue.  As more and more content enters the world wide web, archivists (in particular) have been concerned with how to describe this content. The Library of Congress established a working group: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mdc/  

And what about "Dublin Core" which Dr. Kelly mentions in his book chapter? There are groups of professionals out there who are trying to figure out how documents and materials online should be described and categorized. Without metadata, it would be much more difficult to find anything.
 http://dublincore.org/about-us/

 I think it's worth pasting in the core of Dublin Core:

"DCMI's principles of operation are:

• Open consensus building: Participation in the DCMI community is open to all interested groups or individuals with expertise or interests in metadata. DCMI de facto standards, specifications and best practice documents reflect consensus arrived at through consultative debate and review. No fees are assessed for use of such information, inasmuch as the value of such materials is enhanced by their wide adoption.
• International scope and participation: DCMI arose in the 1990s from an informal workshop series that attracted participation of a world-wide community. DCMI has been committed from the start to global participation, as exemplified by a wide array of translations, the location ofDublin Core conferences and regional meetings, and the diversity of regional representation among the DCMI Members and in the Oversight Committee and Advisory Board.
• Neutrality of purposes and business models: DCMI is neutral as to the purposes for which DCMI de facto metadata standards and specifications might be used. DCMI encourages the adoption of these standards and specifications in the public and private sectors and in further de jure standardization that does not jeopardize open access.
• Neutrality of technology: DCMI de facto standards are fundamentally concerned with semantics—the meaning of assertions about information resources. The technological infrastructure underpinning the encoding and expression of these semantics is expected to evolve with time. DCMI attempts to maintain independence of agreed-upon semantics, and to facilitate the expression of these semantics in encoding idioms appropriate to the active stakeholders of the initiative.
• Cross disciplinary focus: Since its early days in the mid-1990s, DCMI's founding principle has been the discovery and management of resources through metadata across the boundaries of information silos on the Web and within intranets."
  
  That's it for now! I'm assuming you can comment below if you'd like to.