Tag: Web Design

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The future of H-Net… LiveJournal?

Mills Kelly has started a real debate in the last few couple weeks about the future of H-Net.

(Follow-ups can be found here, here, here, and here… And to see some of the response this engendered, check here, here, here, and here. Also, check out the discussion on the Digital History podcast.)

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that, despite the advice of many professors and colleagues, I am not and never have been a member of an H-Net community. I have my reasons, though. And they have everything to do with why I’m writing this.

Mills’s article brings up the notion of email bankruptcy. People have begun declaring bankruptcy on Social Networking Sites. for that matter, too. Now, when I first heard about this phenomenon, it seemed a bit silly. But then I realized that this was exactly the same thing that had happened to me years ago.

You see, around 1998 or 1999, I declared (without using the term) listserv bankruptcy. After three or four years of being very active on several listservs, I realized that deleting messages from my lists was taking so much time I was neglecting to reply to emails from friends and family. I quit them all, and though I’ve joined one or two briefly since then, I’ve been listserv free for most of the last eight years.

So I guess I have a vested interest in coming up with a new, viable direction that H-Net could go in– it’s for the sake of my own professional development that I’m thinking about this, because I really don’t think I could face the possibility of joining one of those things again.

But it hit me the other day: there’s already an existing piece of open-source software that could do everything H-Net does now and more, that can play to its existing strengths and help improve aspects that are less than ideal.

The answer is LiveJournal.

Those of you rolling your eyes, please hear me out.

LiveJournal is a somewhat beleaguered website, a situation that is partially fair and partially unfair. It’s definitely a site where a lot of people are doing the kind of unintellectual, quotidian blogging that some opponents of leaving the listserv format seem to feel dominate blogging. So yeah, LJ is to a certain extent contributing to blogging’s bad rap. The site’s earliest adopters and most dedicated users have historically skewed young and female, too, and I think that this has also brought the site detractors within certain male-dominated circles of geekdom.

But the most important thing for this discussion is the software’s architecture– LiveJournal’s software is largely open-source,  making it relatively easy to pick it up and throw it on another server. That’s definitely a plus for a nonprofit project like HNet.

More importantly, the LiveJournal framework combines elements of blogging, message boards, and SNSs. Transmitting H-Net to this new system would give it much more functionality.

Let’s imagine what HNetJournal might look like. The H-Net Communities that currently exist as listservs could easily exist as communities like those on LJ. Various levels of moderation can be set up on these communities, so the moderated gatekeeper function that the lists currently serve could be mirrored there.

On the other hand, communities that wanted to become more open could allow more openness in their membership and posting policies if they wished. New communities could even be set up that might be more open to those who feel excluded. There could be an H-History-Undergrad community, for example. Similarly, professors could set up a community that was limited to students in a specific, encouraging discussion out of class and getting students into the habit of seeing the learning community as an important part of education.

Beyond the community feature, however, there’s the personal-journal element– the BLOGGING element of this framework. If blogging was done by the same process as posting a new item or a comment on H-Net, I’d wager a lot more academics would begin at least occasionally blogging. And those of us who already blog could easily set up our HNetJournal blog to simply be an RSS feed of our blogs elsewhere. More eyeballs, more hits, greater readership.

These blogs, like the communities, can be as open or as closed as you want them to be. Anyone afraid of prying eyes, and using that as an excuse not to blog, could blog for a closed community of colleagues that he or she has already established contact with. On LJ it’s called your "friends list." Something more professional sounding would be necessary, but the idea’s a good one.

The friends list does several things. It allows for the above-mentioned level of control over readership for those who’re still a bit weary of being "all over the internet." It’s a blog aggregater that’s less scary than dealing with RSS feed readers for the technophobic. It allows for community building across interests, as well. You may encounter a fascinating French Medievalist whose work you want to track, even though your research in 20th century Japan isn’t really relevant. You wouldn’t need to join a French Medievalist community to maintain that contact. HNetJournal could be good for interdisciplinary discussion.

There’s the fear of losing even more readership to contend with, though. This concern is understandable and real. However, I think it could be overcome. First off, LiveJournal is actually fairly user-friendly and intuitive. I’d challenge anyone reading this with skepticism to set up an account, and play around on the site for a little while. It may have a learning curve, but it’s definitely no harder– and I’d argue it’s actually easier– than navigating WebCT, Blackboard, or PeopleSoft. Changing software and re-acclimating has simply become a part of being an academic anymore, and people eventually come around.

Another thing that could be done to curb this loss of eyeballs– and here I’ll defer to anyone with a knowledge of Perl– would be to set up email notification. LJ as it exists today already has a comment notification feature, where users can have (HTML or Plain Text) notifications of any responses to posts or comments they’ve made. I’d imagine it’d be doable to set up a periodic notification email system that simply relayed information about major activities on all of a user’s subscriptions. Thus those who want to have the information put in their inbox to peruse or ignore could continue to have this done.

…I’m sure I’ve got more to say on the topic, but I’m afraid that this post is already too long, and nobody will read it. Assuming it generates any interest, I’ll continue to ruminate and offer a follow-up post soon.

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Digital Pedagogy Done Right!(tm)

If anyone hadn’t gathered from my multiple cartographically-themed posts in the last couple weeks, I’m taking a course on History and Cartography this semester.

I want to take this opportunity to praise two of the websites we visited this week– TypeBrewer and ColorBrewer. Both of these projects quite successfully combine several elements that seem to be essential to good use of new media for pedagogical ends.

For one thing, they’re quite well-designed– they’re easy to use, the interface is straightforward and easy to use, and there’s not much of a learning curve. Similarly, they do what new media does best– they take something quite nuanced and complex and make it simple. The lessons you get experientially from toying with typography or colors in mapping, if you had to do this by trial-and-error, or even worse by hand, would be quite time-consuming and difficult, and you’d risk losing the forest to the trees.

The phrase I just used, "lessons you get experientially," leads me to the next thing I really liked about the sites. Neither was didactic or painfully "educational." I grew up with teachers for parents in the eighties, and I was exposed to my fair share of "educational toys." The ones that I learned the most from were the ones that put the emphasis on "toys" rather than "educational." The interface of these sites is quite pleasing, the "work" you do is quite entertaining… You PLAY with these websites, rather than being instructed by them. And even the most nose-to-the-grindstone, masochistic grad student would rather PLAY than WORK. The element of play encourages continued, protracted use, and thus a more nuanced understanding than a site that simply tells you that A is more effective than B but less successful than C. Moreover, these are somewhat intuitive, aesthetic "lessons," not simple right/wrong issues. The protracted play gives a better SENSE of best methods– and sensibility is more important than dualistic right/wrong treatment of the issues.

Finally, by keeping the options limited and embracing the KISS principle, these projects could be put on the web as free flash tools. If the creators had made them too cumbersomely complex, or if they had been created in 1997, they probably would have ended up as expensive CD-ROMs that would have had less impact on fewer people…

Both pages are doing some of the most important things right when it comes to online pedagogy, and I was just blown away, honestly.

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Sharing a comment…

I actually wrote this as a comment in Ken’s blog, but knowing that there’s a better chance of getting more replies if I post it as a blog entry than there is if I post it as a comment, I’ll repeat myself here:

Another issue I had with "online atlases" is trying to understand what constitutes an online atlas. The atlas is very much a product of bookbinding. The binding makes the atlas– otherwise it’s just a collection of maps. Which is what the Rumsey collection felt like to me– a collection of maps. (Seriously, though– I know it’s in the name, but that didn’t occur to me until I was typing this.)

What elements could be included to make an online atlas more than a collection of maps? To "bind" the maps together, even if it is in a nonlinear fashion? What work do atlases do, other than keeping our maps from getting all over the place? And is it worth the work, both conceptual and time in doing the design, to make an "online atlas" proper? Or is a collection of maps enough?

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…making history “cool?”

History isn’t cool.

I was reading through sepoy’s Polyglot Manifesto (part 2) and came across the following:

…what if I reimagined the text anew. What if I scanned, annotated, tagged all five manuscripts and the translation into a comprehensible data-structure
and presented the text so that the reader could peel, as it were, the
layers of various recensions; read the translation against the
manuscripts; follow the thread or theme in and out of various chapters?
And coolest of all: What if my reader could annotate and tag and link
my medieval persian text to another medieval persian text and another
still? What if the texts spoke to one another and threads connect the
reader, the text and the historian?
(emphasis mine…)

sepoy’s using two or three meanings to the term "cool," here, although I think they’re almost inextricably linked in today’s web 2.0 world. The most obvious, there’s the sense of the word "cool" as "hip." In another sense, the word can be used to less specifically mean "novel." And then, of course, because it’s impossible to leave the guy behind completely, there’s the Marshall McLuhan sense of the word– as in "hot" and "cool" media:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that
extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state
of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition."
A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information
is provided. the ear is given a meager amount of information. Telephone
is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a
meager amount of information. And speech is a
cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has
to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave
so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore,
low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion
by the audience.  Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has
very different effects on the user from a cool
medium like the telephone.

(From Understanding Media)

I have to briefly digress, and say that the internet, especially in its more recent form as web 2.0, actually completely breaks down McLuhan’s division of hot and cool. Is a hot medium? Well, the computer is actually rather "high-definition," so yes– there’s a very precise relay of information. There’s very little "static." Is it a cool medium? Absolutely– despite the high level of definition, it is more participatory than any electronically-mediated medium McLuhan could have imagined in his lifetime– he passed on in 1980. However, the level of "definition" is illusory, because there is no beginning or end to "the internet," and no singular reading. It’s high-definition from single web page to single web page, "well filled with information," but the "edges" bleed. Hypermedia is almost like frostbite. The internet is so cool it feels hot.

sepoy, and others like him in the Digital Humanities, see the future of our discipline shifting toward a "cooling" of History. Historians like hot media. They like books. They like being able to craft their argument, control the ways their work is interpreted and used. And this is an understandable impulse.

But the argument for the Digital Humanities makes sense to me. By using new media’s ability to increase participation, Historians can raise awareness of History– not as an event or single narrative, or a set of facts in temporal order, but as a process of understanding, as a whole set of methodologies and techniques of interpretation and evaluation, as a form of textual analysis.

There’s a widely circulated quotation from Diane Feinstein during the hearings about the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian back in 1995, "…is it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts…? …I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text… was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis…"*

This is the popular view of History, among a large portion of the population– even, obviously, among the well-educated and powerful in this country.

Interactivity and new media give us a chance to help rectify this situation, to show that "doing history" is always, and inherently, a process of making choices, of highlighting and omission, of reconstructing the past in relevant ways, and ultimately, is a manner of understanding not the past, but the present.

_____________________

* This quote can be found in multiple articles, it was a bit of a flashpoint. I found it in an article by James Gardner from The Public Historian (Vol. 26, No. 4) however, the citation for the quote in this article is mis-attributed, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy.

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Confessions of a Logocentrist

Having read Staley’s Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past, I feel compelled to make a confession.  I never suspected it, or I would have come out about it sooner.  But apparently, I am a logocentrist.  A logophile.  A textaholic.  And by Staley’s standards, I’m a Luddite, trapped in my textual ways– a fossil. 

I have to say, I always thought I was a pretty visual person.  I’m a cartoonist by avocation.  I diagram and sketch every paper before I begin to write it.  I’m a product of the "MTV Generation,"1 which according to Staley, is much more visually than textually oriented.  Moreover, my main historical interests are visual: visual culture, history of media, cultural geography.  I rely in my research on a multitude of visual primary sources.  I have been known to incorporate maps, lithographs, and photos into a number of my paper, interspersed with letters, news items, etc.

Yet on almost every page of this book, I found myself saying "no" to the author at least once.  I patently reject much of what’s being said.  I don’t think it would be progress for professors to begin accepting collages as historical research, rather than papers.

Let me backtrack a bit and also say that I wanted to like this book.  I really, really did.  I don’t come to this program with a background in History: I began with literary theory, which took me to cultural theory, which took me to cultural history.  I was delighted to be reading a book that actually engages with works I’ve read and enjoyed– Stephen Pinker, Douglas Hofstadter, Barthes, Foucault, hints at Derrida and even Saussure.  (I actually listed all these authors in the bibliography of my senior thesis, years ago…) 

I should be in my element with this book– a nice change from my constant intimidation in the face of History, with all it’s secrets of historiography and "thinking like an historian."  He talks about the impact of technology on the potential capabilities of maps– a concept that delights and excites me.  And yet I found myself arguing with the author at every turn, digging my heels in, refusing to accept his most basic premises.

I have lots of piddling little arguments with the book– as I mentioned before, probably at least one per page.  But I’ll just go into my two biggest issues here. 

First, I simply cannot accept that visualizations can be employed in a manner that uses the same depth of analysis that prose can.  I may be mistaken– I’m new to this, as I said– but I was under the impression that the discipline of History was about the interpretation of past events, not simply about churning data relevant to past events.  Interpreting the past inherently means dealing with contingency, inchoate data, and abstraction.  This is precisely the kind of stuff that words do better than images.  Images concretize and give the illusion of forming complete wholes.  Language is constituted of slippage, double meanings, uncertainties– it is simply better for addressing questions that cannot be answered, but deserve to be asked.

This kind of leads to my second main objection.  I don’t buy his whole notion that visualizations can show simultaneity better than prose.  The simple fact is, the human brain isn’t very good at comprehending simultaneity.  Most people can’t even look at a grouping of like objects and immediately perceive the number when there are more than five objects in the field.  Look at those stupid commercials for Vonage. You can’t actually watch the person in the foreground because your eyes are drawn to the person in the background.  Of course, the person in the background is doing something distracting, so there’s that.  But try reading Derrida’s Glas, or listening to The Velvet Underground’s "The Murder Mystery". The human brain focuses on one item at a time.  Even Staley’s example of the triangle, circle, and square of varying sizes, labeled A, B, and C, cannot be comprehended in a single glance, simultaneously.  Rather, the eye reads it from left to right, just as when reading text, and takes in one item at a time.

While Staley insists that prose is "one dimensional," I don’t buy it.  While you cannot read more than one word at a time, the mind moves around within the sentence, the paragraph, and the book or article as a whole while in the process.  The method of input may be one-dimensional, but the experience is certainly multidimensional.  An active reader will flip back and forth through a book when engaged, double-checking things, re-reading passages that have suddenly become relevant or suspect.  If I am right in my assumption that visualizations won’t be useful unless "read" as a sum of individual parts, how is this so different?

Don’t get me wrong– I’ll keep using maps and pictures in my work.  I’d love to be able to develop an interactive map of, say Boston Common.  But I don’t think that any such map could replicate or surpass the level of analysis that can be conveyed in writing.  It’s still supplemental to me.

There’s lessons to be taken from the book, and things to think about.  But overall, I think that Staley, who describes himself as a "futurist" in his about-the-author section, is too given to the hyperbole and pie-in-the-sky optimism of tech-boomers. 

Maybe that’s the most surprising thing of all– that the book was published, not in the midst of the speculative and naive technology boom of the late nineties, but in 2003, long after that bubble burst.

_________________

1I was two years old when MTV went on the air. I’m as MTV Generation as they come. As a sidenote, if the MTV generation is so anti-reading, as we’ve been hearing ever since that term was coined (probably when I was four), why does MTV now have its own book imprint?

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…Really just spitballing, here…

…And before anyone accuses me of being grotesque or bringing bodily fluids into this, Answer Girl gives a good definition of the term here. I use the phrase a lot, but sometimes I get a funny look, so I thought I’d start with that caveat…

Before I even knew that this was the week we’re talking about wikis in the history and new media class, I thought of one possible idea for something I might like to do as a project related to that class– just because it occurred to me and seemed like a good idea.  And I guess I’m throwing this out to you all, in part, because I’m wanting to see if anyone else would be interested in working on this, because wikis are so inherently collaborative…

Would anyone else be interested in working on a historiography wiki? It seems like something that could potentially be a useful tool and a edifying thing to work on…

The way I’m picturing it is this: it would work like any other wiki, but specifically focus on the historical, linking history with historians.  You could have pages on historians, which might include major works, their academic/intellectual pedigree, who influenced them, who they influenced, topics and periods covered, etc.  These could then be linked to other entries, about specific books, periods, areas, etc.  The advantage of it would be that, once it took on some volume, you could go to one place to find out who to start with if you want to find out about a specific topic, say, or who some contemporary historians covering your time period are to a text you’re reading. 

I think it’d be useful, too.  It could be a great study tool for people trying to prep for comps– not just as a resource, giving information, but as a way of cataloging what you’ve read.  Writing pages about books you’ve read would help solidify them in your mind.  And the collaborative nature of wikis would mean that others could point you to other readings that might benefit you, via edits and hypertextual connections…

Any thoughts?  Anyone interested? Anyone think it’s a bad idea?  Why?

******************************

At any rate, toward that end, I poked around on Wikipedia, trying to get a feel for how complex it was, etc.  I have to admit, it was intimidating looking at all that code!  I wasn’t sure what I was looking at…

Eventually, I figured out that part of the reason is that Wikipedia is coded in XHTML, which is apparently sort of like the bastard child of HTML and XML… And since you might say I have "small HTML and less XML," this hybrid was a bit confusing.  But then I got to thinking: how much of this is just stuff that’s on every page?  So I looked.  I tried to find two pages on two fairly unrelated topics– so they were likely to have few authors in common.  I picked the entries on The Germs and Rodolphe Töpffer. Two fairly unlike topics. Once I did that, I was actually impressed at how similar the two pages were, despite their different material.

The basic Wikipedia format is a standardized Cascading Style Sheet.  Most everything looked the same, when viewing the source code, for several, several lines.  There were some things that were in one entry, though that weren’t in the other.  I started looking at these.  The first thing that caught my eye was that on the entry on the Germs, this section:

The Germs
Origin Los Angeles, California
Country United States of America
Years active 1977 – 1980, 2005 – present
Genres Punk rock
Labels Slash Records
Past members Darby Crash
Pat Smear
Michelle Baer
Dinky
Lorna Doom
Dottie Danger
Donna Rhia
Nicky Beat
Don Bolles

Is done through a series of tables– though the code that controls a lot of how tables look, their color, things like that– can be found in the CSS.  That makes sense, as you’d want something like Wikipedia to have a fairly uniform appearance… (As an aside, check out who "Dottie Danger" really is– it might surprise you!)

((As a further aside, ’cause I know a lot of you are novice geeks like me, and might not know such things, and be learning by trial and error– I had to edit the above table just slightly… when I just cut and pasted it out of the source code from Wikipedia, it wasn’t redirecting.  I looked at the source code, and figured out what it was: the href tags were redirecting as if you’re already in Wikipedia.  So to make it work, I just had to change this:

<a title="Record label" href="/wiki/Record_label">Labels</a>

to this:

<a title="Record label" href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_label>Labels</a>

which makes sense– without the http bit, it was trying to transfer it WITHIN the site, and didn’t know it was referring to an outside one…))

******************************

Well, I could keep on talking, but I’m probably only proving my ignorance, so I’ll quit with that now– enough "under the hood" talk from the guy who doesn’t know a crankshaft from a carburetor.

However, before I close out this entry, for anyone else who’s interested in getting deeper into this coding and web design stuff, but maybe not the most familiar with the ins and outs of it, you’ve probably found, like I have, that just Googling for unfamiliar terms and tags tends to just give you a lot more unfamiliar terms and tags…  I’ve found HTMLdog.com’s HTML for Beginners and their CSS for Beginners pages to be pretty simple to read and informative. Once I finish both of them, I’ll check out their intermediate pages, and report back on those. Anyone who knows of other similar sites, feel free to send ’em along.

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In which our author remembers that design is important…

Reading Digital History was an interesting experience. The sections on design really challenged me to think about my own sense of style and design– something that I admit I’ve mostly left to the level of instinct and convenience ’til now.  When it comes to my activities online, I’ve usually gone for the simplest pre-fab design available– whatever doesn’t look too flashy, or too "the Internet circa 1998."  (If you want a good example of this sort of ugliness, check out Myspace, or any Geocities fan site that hasn’t been modified for ages… or, if you’re looking for a bit of ironic fun, the Paperrad art collective’s web page.)

Beyond that, the only thing I’ve really taken any sort of aesthetic "stand" of any sort on is my cartooning, and since my foot’s strongly in the primitivist camp on that one, I’ve just forced myself to draw what comes naturally, without really questioning what or why or wherefore.  Even when I was doing digital scans of my work and altering them for the little gallery show I was in this summer, I when about my Photoshopping much more quickly and thoughtlessly than did my friend I was showing with, a professional designer.  Other than when functionality is defeated by design, or when it’s just plain ugly (again, see Myspace…) I’ve never really questioned the underlying purposes that make for good design– the reasons some things work well, and others don’t. I’ve been satisfied to keep it simple, clean, and when at all possible, "natural."

So of course after reading the sections on design, when I logged back into Typepad, my first response was to spend 45 minutes tinkering with design elements that, in the end, make very little difference.  I went to a full justify on the columns, because I simply find full justifies to be more readable– probably because they hark back to "professional" printed texts… I’ve never seen why, in the age of the word processor, anyone would be content to leave a document left-justified.  It doesn’t look "done," to me, and the jagged edges on the right side distract my eye.  Frankly, I’m surprised that Six Apart made it the default on any of their pre-fab designs… 

I also switched the fonts over to TNR, just ’cause I roll that way.  I know that, according to Cohen & Rosenzweig, sans serif fonts are better for large blocks of text on-screen, but I just like serif fonts.  Especially TNR.  Again, it looks "professional," "printed."  (Plus, I keep on going back to the words of a friend of mine, a designer and a psych student, who found several studies that suggested that serif fonts are easier to read, because the little details– the tail on the "t," the crossy-thing on the "G"– in other words, the serifs– actually make it easier and quicker for the brain to recognize the letters… It’s a sort of over-determination that speeds up recognition…  Anyway, that’s what she told me, once, and it stuck with me.)

(Also, just because I’m not able not to do such things, I went and Wikipedia’d "serif…" it’s actually an interesting little article, if you feel like geeking out a bit further on the topic.)

At any rate, I’ve come to something I’m reasonably satisfied with.  Actually, that’s not completely true.  I want to get a hold of Photoshop and put together a .jpg that I can use for a title banner, rather than just this line of text– something a little more interesting to look at.  And also, I couldn’t find anything resembling an ecru or eggshell type color on any of the HTML color sheets that Google brought up… And I’d really like an off-white background, just ’cause it’s gentler, and because it kind of gives that parchment-y, "historical" feel, which is good for a history blog.  If anyone has knowledge of an off-white HTML color code, please– help a brother out.

And on the note of less-is-more design, I really have nothing critical to say about The Diary of Samuel Pepys. All I can really say is "wow."  It’s not much to look at, but it doesn’t have to be– and I love the idea of making a group project out of the hypertextualization of a text, creating annotations that work together to improve understanding. 

And the idea of "releasing" new entries on the date they were written is a great idea– more than the simple conceit it may have started as.  "Releasing" new entries in real-time (or, as you might properly call it, lag-time…) helps to create a community– it makes the community of reader-annotators only have to make a small investment of time, or at least fosters that illusion by breaking it up.  Hypertextualizing a text of any length is an arduous project, time-consuming even for a team of people paid to do so.  However, by making this project something that can be done repeatedly, at will, in small chunks, the person who put it up has created a volunteer army of historians and enthusiasts to work on the task.

I think it’s an amazing project, and I wish it was being done with the diary of someone who falls closer to my research areas, geographically or temporally. I’m half-tempted to steal the concept, and do it with one of the many Boston-area diarists or letter-writers– say, someone like William Tudor or Samuel Sewall.  Sewall would be especially interesting, just ’cause I remember being befuddled and confused by so many of the references made in his diaries, when I was doing my Boston Common research. 

Those old diaries can feel like they’re written in code, sometimes.

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