till, the episode eroded Wikipedia's credibility and led to efforts at damage control. Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia would now require users to register before creat- ing new articles.
One of the first steps towards fixing the initial problem I mentioned about Wikipedia earlier.
If anything, the bias in Wikipedia articles favors the subject at hand. "Articles tend to be whatever-centric," they acknowledge in one of their many self-critical commentaries. "People point out whatever is exceptional about their home province, tiny town or bizarre hobby, without noting frankly that their home province is completely unremarkable, their tiny town is not really all that special or that their bi
I'll grant this concession. This is probably unobjectionable true.But at the same time, this happens with "normal" history as well. The Greeks were the greatest to the Greeks. Western Society posited itself as the great civilizations opposed to the savages, and for hundreds and thousands of years, even to this day, history has been written by the victors.
de in Lincoln's life. But surely any reader of this jour- nal would prefer the American National Biography Online sketch by the prominent Civil War historian James
Is it wrong to say "I don't know about that". I mean. I'm reading this journal, but at the same time, the super accessible, broken down (by date, subject, place, etc) subsections that Wikipedia provides are remarkably convenient and concise. Maybe if my explicit goal was to learn all about Lincoln. No, not the ideal source. But for referencing facts, quick looks, or just getting a factual, concise understanding of some event or individual, I'll have to disagree with the author here.
Biographies of historical figures offer a more favorable terrain for Wikipedia since bi- ography is always an area of popular historical interest. Moreover, biographies offer the opportunity for more systematic comparison because the unit of analysis is clear-cut, whereas other topics can be sliced and diced in multiple ways. But eve
Also, a lot of this occurs within a time frame that people who are writing have immediate access to. Writing about something from more than 100 years ago means no one alive today saw it and it wasn't recorded. Meanwhile, you can listen to speeches from Hitler to Roosevelt to MLK Jr. You can watch Kennedy and the Moon landing. Much more accessible than other forms of history.
rstand the concept of free software, you should think of "free speech" more than "free
Also, this is why Wikipedia needs donations and revenue to sustain it. Is it common practice to assume that all those servers and all the fundamentals of running a website are somehow cost-free?
Since then, Wikipedia's growth has accelerated. It had almost a half million articles by its third anniversary in January 2004; it broke the million mark just nine months later. More than fifty-five thousand people have made at least t
You just had to be more careful then than now about making sure all the citations and information were "all good". Nowadays it's remarkable how well constructed, cited, and informed posts are (though, do your homework nonetheless).
rds to specific historians-we are taught to speak of "Richard Ho
Is this distinct from other fields? Citation always being accompanied by monetary compensation does seem a bit odd assuming you're not literally plagiarizing them. It would seem to stunt the field if you had to pay to build upon the foundation of someone else, but maybe that's just me. You don't pay to sample someone else in music or pay to build on quantum mechanics, that just seems odd.
Thinking about data.
Arguably one of the most important aspects when it comes to this. Digital or otherwise. Extremely relevant.
All for getting students to more convincingly connect evidence description to interpretation.
Any of the above sound familiar to anyone? Just me? Haha.
Some call them “digital natives,” a problematic term on multiple counts. But the connotations of native aside, it is true, in my experience, that today’s students exist effortlessly in a digital world of consumption.
The experience of over-writing another’s work, discussing the ambiguity of language and image, creating new tags and subtags, and developing methodology such as the living dictionary taught the group that data is never neutral.
Hey! This is a point straight out of last weeks reading #2. That data is never neutral. It can reinforce or contradict entirely by which avenue it is being utilized. It's interpretation.
Such discomfort around digital decisions could be compounded when the act of critical reflection and group revision leads to the team to overwrite one’s idea. One of the ways we leverage this digital discomfort is to move it from the realm of the individual to the realm of the group.
I feel like I need to reiterate a point I made in a previous annotation. I really feel like I'm missing something here. Isn't this just normal critical group/research work? I read down the "Digital Discomfort and Research Consciousness" section, and I sort of understand what they're trying to say. That the medium of digital-work allows them to make these Google Sheets, and there's more freedom, and this concept of "research interests" are >= institutional parameters, but something isn't fundamental clicking. Think I'ma have to office hours, hahaha.
When we embraced digital discomfort as an inevitable experience and discussed it among the research team with emotional transparency, we found that it contributed to heightened research consciousness for scholars of all career stages.
I'm slightly confused as to what Digital Discomfort is. Specifically, what separates it from "regular" discomfort when engaging in a project. Is the distinction that is through digital media only? Or is there something I'm missing (which I feel like I am, haha).
In the “Golden Age” of postcards, the decades before World War I, postcards circulated with the same fervor, if not speed, of images on popular social media apps today.
Perhaps I need to read into the SPP itself to find this answer, but is this contained only within the country. Obviously someone from France could send a postcard to the US, but what I mean is, if something even remotely significant occurs in the US, or in England, or Russia, or literally anywhere someone way over in Peru or Germany can comment, be informed, participate in the conversation, etc. So, was the "fervor" and "speed" equaling "social media apps today" limited by country simply due to technological limitations? Or were people in Italy also aware of, and championing ideas of suffrage?
Engaging in computational analysis requires a digital historian to create datasets, and data needs definition to be processed. Forcing uncertain information into a fixed value, such as a date or specific place, when source material may not offer that certainty creates tension for historians and may mean that a specific digital method cannot reasonably be employed as means for analysis.
This is important for a lot of other reasons too. It was touched on a bit in the other reading, but one has to be careful the story one uses the data to tell, and it's also why everything should be preserved not just specific ones that fit the narrative.Otherwise, we run the risk of history becoming only what we choose to preserve, rather than what actually happened.
Immersive websites and games have also played an important role in history education.
Also, at least for me, I can think of quite a few that inspired further exploration, further learning, and a drive to pursue them.
At the same time, digital scanning and photography, combined with web protocols, have allowed individuals and organizations to build, curate, and share more inclusive collections around themes and communities.
I think this is an important caveat to the previous point. I have to imagine that a lot of physical collections were limited by them being physical in the first place. Yes, we may have missed out on aspect that were deemed unworthy of saving to those in the past, but now, moving forward, it grants us the ability to save everything. Not just that which is limited by demand, or space, or cost.
Meanwhile, we are going to have to work actively so those systematically less pre-sent in printed sources do not fall out of view.
I do wonder the impacts of what is lost to time. Obviously, we've already lost a bounty of information to time over the last thousands of years, but humans today (within the last several hundred years) also out-produce the humans of a thousand years ago. So while more may be saved as a %, that doesn't mean we aren't loosing so, so much (and how that shapes the history of.... history for the future). I think that's the point being made here.
This pattern from the past is exacerbated by disparities in the present. Digitiza-tion projects centered initially in English, secondarily in other Western languages.
Here's another aspect, alluding to some of the problems Jezebel mentioned. 1st language or otherwise, we are speaking English, and by virtue of that alone have eons more access than someone who doesn't.
When glancingbecomes faster by many orders of magnitude, and national boundaries no longer con-strict our range of vision, the number of transnational hypotheses shaping our collec-tive mission is necessarily going to rise.
Unfortunately, this also has the unforeseen consequence of allowing people to find the narrative they want to create. With enough information also comes the ability to piece together ideas that can harm and actually counter positive learning.
Precisely because web-enabled digital search simply accelerates the kinds of infor-mation-gathering that historians were already doing, its integration into our practicehas felt smooth rather than revolutionary.
I wonder how true this actually is. Though I wasn't alive to see it's initial impact, the internet itself has vastly impacted every facet of life. Maybe to Historians specifically, technology transition was "smooth", but life in the world 30 years ago, compared to what can be accessed through even Wikipedia, online databases, etc, has to be profoundly different, right?
Moreover, historical inquiry that is powered by patterns in the digitizable detritusof the modern world will tend to foreground certain kinds of actors and certain as-pects of their lives, pulling toward “a kind of international provincialism” that fails tonote key local and national dynamics.
This also plays a large part in how the overall narrative is shaped. If you asked a bystander if they could identify even one media/tech giant that shapes how we receive our information, and what effect that plays on what information we ultimately "know", I'm sure they could name several.
n
It is interesting to read that most people had a negative experience with graded papers. Some of it appears to be a culture difference, some more of a feeling that ended up hurting the overall work. Some of that I definitely agree with. Arbitrarily receiving a lower grade due to some sort of syntax error of misspelling always seemed a little harsh--and the idea of grading on a harsh rubric scale always seemed limiting. Someone could have a 95% perfect paper but not have a thesis in their first paragraph and now gets a C? On the other hand, I do believe some sort of metric should be applied. Maybe not grading in the traditional sense, but learning from mistakes, ways to create a more powerful argument, or what could have been done to make a superior end product (whether that be for argument, research, or what have you) is immensely helpful.