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The Ugly Truth About Preservation

Is Bert Evil?  And, Should We Care?

There once was a website called Bert Is Evil.  It no longer exists.  Is it important that it no longer exists?  Perhaps it becomes important when we realize that it disappeared after September 11.  The image of Bert was inserted to an anti-America image and the creator of Bert Is Evil was threatened with legal action, so he deleted the site.  But, if you want it is still possible to see what Bert Is Evil looked like.  This is because of Internet Archive, a private organization that tries to archive the Internet.  This is a noble goal but one organization cannot do such work alone.  In his article Scarcity of Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, Roy Rosenzweig writes about issues dealing with digital and physical preservation, the issues with each, and the relationship between historians and archivists.

The idea that the Internet should be preserved is catching on and people are wondering who is going to do it and how it is going to be done.  When this article was written, 2003, the government was not preserving the digital world, or records created digitally.  The National Archives does not require that digital record be kept digitally.  Rosenzweig then makes the point that even if digital record preserved the technology that they are preserved with may not be readable five years later.  It is not that the technology has deteriorated it is that it is now outdated. Rosenzweig states: “well before most digital media degrade, they are likely to become unreadable because of changes in hardware…or software.” While I am not always on the digital bandwagon the Internet has changed everything and it is time to conquer the problem of preservation.

But what will happen once the Internet is being archived faithfully?  It is very possible that once this happens there will be amazing amounts of primary source material available. No longer will historians be able to complain about not having enough information, they will be complaining about having too much information.  What will the world come to when historians have a plethora of information?  My sarcasm aside Rosenzweig’s point is a good one.  What will happen when scholars have too many sources, have too much information, have too many places to look?  While not having enough information can be frustrating at least a topic can be narrow and have focus.  This possibility could be a reality but only if society starts preserving all of the digital material being created right now.  Just preserving these records though is not the end it is merely the beginning of a process.

The Archivist and the Historian Should be Friends

What I found most interesting in the Rosenzweig’s article was his dissection of the relationship between archivists and historians.  After reading Nicholson Baker’s book Double Fold I had some idea of the disagreement between historians and archivist, and yes I am a bit biased on the side of keep everything.  After reading Rosenzweig’s article I think the relationship between the groups is better explained.  Historians want to save everything while archivist have to figure out how to store everything that gets preserved, not the easiest job.  What comes through the last part of the article is about the different directions that historians and archivists approach the topic of preservation.  Rosenzweig makes the point that both parties will have to change their attitudes before they have another conversation about preservation again, but he is adamant that both groups need to talk about how to preserve the past and how to preserve digital records as well.

Rosenzweig makes the point that in the beginning the historian and the archivist were friends.  They were part of the same professional organization, the AHA, when “historians saw themselves as having a responsibility for preserving as well as researching the past.”  Now perhaps this is a bit strong but the divide between being a historian and an archivist has become great.  To go by this strong characterization historians want to save everything while archivist have to figure out how to store everything that gets preserved.  What comes through the last part of the article is about the different directions that historians and archivists approach the topic of preservation.  Rosenzweig makes the point that both parties will have to change their attitudes before they have another conversation about preservation again, but he is adamant that both groups need to talk about how to preserve the past and how to preserve digital records as well.

Scarcity or Abundance is a valuable article for better understanding the complexities of preservation digital or otherwise.  The Internet has changed the way that documents are created and preservation of physical documents has never been easy.  How history is being preserved is important and it is equally important that historians and archivist understand what needs to be, should be, and is being preserved.

 

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Digital Photography; A Perspective

I was being given a tour of the catwalk of the Verizon Center, the home of the Washington Capitals, Wizards and the Mystics by DC’s official photographer, Mitchell Layton when I realized what I wanted my digital project to be. Tying in themes from my written project proposal, I wanted to venture into the realm of sports photography and further explore the transition between film and digital photography and its significance in changing the archiving method of the photos.

I would like to use a website like Omeka, or venture into the world of Adobe’s Dreamweaver in an attempt to design my own website to try to document the change over the past couple decades towards the use of digital cameras instead of film, which had been the staple for nearly a century of sports photography. I would also like to continue exploring the idea of the future leaning more towards high-resolution digital video rather than continuing to use photography.

Newseum has a travelling exhibit: “Athlete: The Sports Illustrated Photography of Walter Iooss” that I would like to view that might help me further understand what exactly it is that I want to do. I’ve heard that the work of art is rather moving, but there’s no online version of the exhibit. I would love to be able to use an exhibit in the mind of this display in order to allow those who don’t know much about digital sports photography to learn about the transition from film to digital storage. I would like to use photos from several different photographers, though that might be difficult to acquire. From there, I would use my idea of creating interviews from my print project and turn it into an interactive podcast for the viewers. These podcasts would be interviews with the professional photographers that I know, in an attempt for my viewers to better understand the transition. These podcasts would be a series of interviews coming from different photographers that would focus on the ease (or struggles) of the transition. I will try to explore the effectiveness of archiving the photos, selling the photos, and submitting them to newspapers or magazines and getting them published.

With this in mind, I’m not sure if I should focus on the struggles of photographers from around the country or just in the immediate D.C. area. Input on this would be helpful, but I’m starting to lean towards focusing on just the D.C. and Maryland area. Finally, I want to explore what consequences this has had on the ability of photographers to find and keep jobs. Having talked to Mitchell Layton, I know that there are interesting stories about SI dropping photographers, so I think that would be really interesting to explore.

Design-wise, I would love to be able to make a digital exhibit, where a viewer can come and explore at their own pace, taking their time and listening to a full podcast, or moving on to another topic of digital photography. Using Communicating Design will be rather helpful in developing this website, but I think my graphic design class will help me too, especially in making the design more appealing to the consumer. From this perspective, my target audience will be history buffs and those that are looking to get into the business of digital photography. I want to provide an accurate history and an interesting perspective on what may happen in the realm of digital sports photography. Besides, I’m an amateur photographer myself, and I would find a site like this extremely intriguing. Hopefully other people like me would find it interesting too.

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Mapping WIMS

Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS) was a program developed by National Council of Negro Women in 1963 to bring Northern and Southern women together with the goal of improving race relations and quality of life for blacks in the highly segregated South. Teams of interracial, interfaith women from Northern cities would travel to various locations in Mississippi on Tuesdays and return on Thursdays. During their stay, these groups would hold meetings with local community members, white and black, lead workshops and implement programs to encourage self-improvement for poor, uneducated members of the population, particularly black women.

For my digital project, I will create a multifaceted blog called ‘Mapping WIMS’ using WordPress.com (unless I can get Omeka figured out). The complete records of the Wednesdays in Mississippi program are held at the National Archives for Black Women’s History (NABWH), where I work as an archives technician. This comprehensive collection includes photographs, audio recordings and manuscript materials that illustrate the efforts and results of the various WIMS teams in aiding the civil rights movement. Thus my blog will present and dovetail each of these sources available in the WIMS materials.

As the study of the Civil Rights Era grows ever more popular, it is important that women’s direct actions in the civil rights movement not be overlooked. There are already some good sources about WIMS on the web, such as the website for the WIMS Film Project. This documentary project has been in the works for a few years and has set forth to gather oral history interviews for use in the film. It has also established a visually appealing website with good basic information and an overview of the project, but little else. In my opinion, this website’s best asset is its promise of ‘more to come’ and raising awareness of WIMS as a scholarly topic.    

The film project page shares a link to the University of Houston’s exhibit website on WIMS. This wonderful site “began as a collaboration between the Virginia Center for Digital History, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Civil Rights Museum, and the Wednesdays in Mississippi Film Project, with Holly Cowan Shulman, Editor in Chief.” Holly Schulman is the daughter of Polly Cowan, a founding member of WIMS. In late 2009, the University of Houston Center for Public History (UH-CPH) took over this web site and it has been incorporated into graduate level course work at the University of Houston. This site touches on many important elements of the WIMS experience and provides interesting primary materials for its audience to browse. It also gives highly detailed information about the members of specific team, something I will also strive to do. But relatively speaking, the web exhibit itself is not particularly sophisticated or visually stimulating. It lacks original photographic material from the WIMS collection at NABWH, which I will have the fortune of incorporating with the click of a mouse.

Last, there is Liza Cowan’s (Polly’s other daughter) personal blog where she posts about WIMS and her family experience with the women who worked on the project, her mother in particular. Obviously this is not a scholarly source, but her posts about WIMS are informative and enjoyable to read. Each of these WIMS sites has brought something different to the web narrative of the program. I plan to incorporate some of the fundamental elements of each of these sites in my blog project

In order to set my WIMs project apart from those already existing, I will take a more fluid, multi-media approach to presenting information about each WIMS team. As a visualization tool, I will create different maps using  My Maps from Google to illustrate the various routes and destinations of each team. I can use the geographical information pulled from manuscript and visual materials to pinpoint the locations of each trip. With this mapping tool, I can also landmark notable locations in Mississippi where other civil rights events unfolded. These maps will be supplemented by photographs, scans of original documents and audio clips. By presenting each team’s unique routes, characters, actions, and narratives, I can provide specific cases studies that will implicitly reveal a broader perspective on the WIMs program.

This blog will hopefully serve as another sounding board for the small pool of scholars working on Wednesdays in Mississippi, as well as those investigating the broader topic of women in the civil rights movement. Perhaps a casual web search on someone’s grandmother will reveal a past of civil rights activism unknown in the family history. A local historian may never have heard of the pig bank set up in a rural Mississippi town. My hope is that this project will enliven the story of the regular women who made it their mission to help desegregate the South in their own way and encourage researchers to dig further.

Documents and photographs that have never been seen by the public will enrich the small body of available WIMS material on the web. Using clear titles and descriptions for various uploaded documents, the content will hopefully get picked up by web searches and linked-to by other web sites. Upon completing the project, I will share it with other WIMS researchers for their personal use and commentary. The ultimate goal would be to spur interest in Wednesdays in Mississippi and the National Council of Negro Women and in turn increase research in the NAWBH.

To monitor the site’s success, I will keep track of how many hits the blog gets and how much commentary is coming in. Ideally the blog posts and links will invite scholarly debate and dialogue, which will encourage people to think harder about this topic in U.S. women’s history. Also, participants in the discussion might bring new information that can then be shared among other WIMS researchers. A win-win for all of us.

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Project Proposal: History (Comps) in the Digital Age

“Hey John, we’re all getting together to study for our comprehensive exams every Saturday evening for the next two months. Can you make it?” This question may be the ultimate blessing to any graduate student. Unfortunately, John’s worries about his exams are not alleviated. “I can’t,” John responds. “I work every Saturday night. Is there any other time we can get together?” The study group has already been formed, and no one is willing to budge on the day or time. “Hey, I’ve got an idea!” Mary says with a smile on her face. “Why don’t we just post our practice papers and notes online so John, and anyone else who can’t make it, can still be a part of the group.”

Comprehensive Exams (hereafter often referred to as “comps”) for history graduate students can be a daunting experience. It’s a pass or fail situation, and failure can alter your life’s plans in significant ways. Professors and universities understand how intimidating comps can be, and often provide packets of study materials to aid their students. They also encourage students to form study groups so they can learn from each other and organize their thoughts. While this can be an important tool in aiding comp study, not all students have the schedules that enable in-person discussion. In the digital age in which we live, there is no reason why these study groups cannot be formed online. In addition, creating a website that allows students from different universities to share their own notes, book reviews, and practice essays may help to create an immediate cross-departmental cohort of future historians. While it could be argued that historiography (the subject of comprehensive exams) is generally taught the same throughout the nation, experience has shown that university history departments across the nation place emphasis on different ideas and schools of thought according to their own teaching models. By opening a cross-departmental dialogue to graduate students at the very beginning of their studies, historycomps.com (or a similarly titled website) will help in educating students beyond their universities’ walls.

Universities, like American University, currently offer classes that help students as they study for comprehensive exams. In the Colloquium classes at AU, students are given a list of historiographically significant books within different subfields. Of these lists, which often include twenty to thirty works per week, students are assigned three to five works to read and write reviews on throughout the semester. This ensures that each week five or six students present their own book reviews to the entire class. While these reviews give students some understanding of the historiography of that particular field, many books are left unread and are never discussed in class. If the class were expanded to include students across the nation, the chances of finding book reviews of these previously “silenced” works increases. Thus, historycomps.com will allow students from colloquium class across the nation to post their own book reviews of works they’ve read, and read those reviews posted by other students.

The idea of online study groups is nothing new. Various websites offer students the ability to create their own groups, including rcampus.com, cramster.com, and grouptable.com. Unfortunately, most of these websites cater to undergraduate studies, often focusing on specific classes. In regard to comprehensive exams, most universities (and sometimes individual professors) provide study guides to their students (i.e. HistoryProfessor.org, WCU’s Guide). Sometimes sample and past questions are even given to help students write practice essays (like these questions from American University). While these tools are useful, especially the ability to write practice essays from previous comp exams, allowing students to share what they’ve written with each has many benefits. One obvious benefit beyond simply learning the historiography is the ability to read how others conceptualize the historiography.

In order to make this website valuable to history graduate students, a number of features need to be implemented. Historycomps.com will provide a listing of important scholarly works divided by a historical subfield whereupon students will be able to click on those works directing them to a page that includes 1) a link to scholarly book reviews on JSTOR and 2) a link to graduate student reviews that have been uploaded. Students will also be able to upload their own book reviews to share with others. One may wonder why student book reviews would have any value if students could go straight to scholarly reviews. Since graduate students typically write their reviews for classes that require explicit discussion of the historiography, these reviews play an important role in studying for comps. Of course, not every student review will have comparable value. Thus, students will be able to grade reviews they have read on a scale of 1 to 10 (from useless to useful) such that uploaded student reviews will be listed in order of usefulness.

In addition to book reviews, historycomps.com will also provide a list of sample comprehensive questions that students can answer in practice essays which they can later upload to the site. Students will be able to click on the individual questions which will direct them to individual pages designed for those questions. Each question’s page will include 1) a list of books (in alphabetical order) to consider when answering the question and 2) links to student-uploaded answers to those questions. The list of books will be obtained from the question’s subfield listed above. Students will be able to add books from their own university-suggested lists so that no important work will be left out. By sharing practice essays between history departments throughout the country, students will be able to view a wide variety of responses. Since different departments create their own questions to comp exams, students will also be able to post their own department sample questions. This will ensure that no single department’s focus is prioritized. It will also provide a wider variety of possible comp exam questions for students to consider in their studies.

Since this website depends on student participation, it will need to be marketed directly to university history departments. Once the website has been created (most likely using something like wordpress), department chairs will be notified by email so that they can forward the site’s address to their students. In addition, Google AdWords allows for specific marketing using key words (like “comprehensive exams”) so that students searching for help online can easily find historycomps.com. Given the scope of this project, it will be started with a focus on American history comprehensive exams and, if successful, it can be expanded to include European history, Asian history, etc. The success of this project can easily be evaluated in time based on the number of uploads, including both student reviews and practice essays.

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Project Proposal: Supreme Court Podcast

For everyone who does not know me, I am a massive Supreme Court nerd. I love learning about the American legal system and how it changes over time. However, I find one of the biggest problems with learning about the high court is that the decisions are dense. Let’s face it, it is not light reading by any definition. So what I propose to do for my digital project is to do a series of podcasts about major Supreme Court decisions. The idea is to deliver old information in a new format (an audio format rather than a written one), using a new delivery system (a blog on the internet), and to do it in a more approachable manner. The idea of the podcast is that each one would be around five minutes in length, and cover the background information of the case, the decision and its impact on American history.  The goal of the site would to be to provide introductory level education on any specific cases that I would be doing. For the sake of limiting my work load, I would be aiming for one podcast per week each week following Spring Break for a total of seven. For this reason, I will be picking some the most important cases and subject in Supreme Court history, but also try to include some of the less well known or less discussed cases that also had a big impact in United States history, for the sake of accomplishing my goal of education.

There are a couple of web site out there currently that are meant to present a  brief form of Supreme Court history (Oyez.org in particular), but I plan on doing things differently in a couple of ways. First of all, I am planning going to present my information in a audio format to try an accommodate people who prefer learning by hearing rather than reading. Second, I am planning to provide more background and history to each case. Oyez.org is very good at providing people with the most necessary of information, but the site’s brevity can be annoying occasionally, especially because they are much more focused on the legal portion of the decision. My focus would be more on the history of the court as well as what impact individual decisions had. If I had to form a mission statement of what I am trying to teach, it would probably be that I want show people that the court does not exist in a bubble and that its decisions come from somewhere and have some effect. I want to show this in a brief, approachable manner. To provide a morsel of information to get people interested about Supreme Court history and show them other places where they can find more information.

If I had to pick an audience for my project, it would probably just be people who are interested in the court and American history, but do not really know where to go to find out more information.

My personal measure for this to be a success, beyond just keeping to a regular update schedule, would be getting at least 5 people to download my podcasts and hopefully to get them to discuss with me whether or not I helped them.

There are a couple of web site out there currently that are meant to present a  brief form of Supreme Court history (Oyez.org in particular), but I plan on doing things differently in a couple of ways. First of all, I am planning going to present my information in a audio format to try an accommodate people who prefer learning by hearing rather than reading. Second, I am planning to provide more background and history to each case. Oyez.org is very good at providing people with the most necessary of information, but the site’s brevity can be annoying occasionally, especially because they are much more focused on the legal portion of the decision. My focus would be more on the history of the court as well as what impact individual decisions had. If I had to form a mission statement of what I am trying to teach, it would probably be that I want show people that the court does not exist in a bubble and that its decisions come from somewhere and have some effect. I want to show this in a brief, approachable manner. To provide a morsel of information to get people interested about Supreme Court history and show them other places where they can find more information.

My personal measure for this to be a success, beyond just keeping to a regular update schedule, would be getting at least 5 people to download my podcasts and hopefully to get them to discuss with me whether or not I helped them.