Category Archives: Tools

My Project

Projects, Tools

For my project, I’d like to use what we learned in the XML and CSS course to build a site with a table for organizing court cases related to censorship and obscenity trials. I figure information can be organized and sorted by plaintiff, defendant, date or year, whether the decision was a state or federal one (or foreign one, in one case), and whether the case was overturned by a later case. I would like to include links to brief summaries of the case histories (this is a history project after all). To give an idea of how many cases I’m thinking of using, the following have been among the most notable in previous research. They are presented in chronological order. Thoughts?

Regina v. Hicklin (1868) (English case)

Dunlop v. US (1897)

Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915)

Winters v. New York (1948)

United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948)

Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952)

Gelling v. Texas (1952)

Alberts v. California (1957)

Roth v. US (1957)

Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)

Freedman v. Maryland (1965)

Ginzburg v. US (1966)

Ginsber v. State of NY (1968)

Miller v. California (1973)

FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978)

Week 7

Readings, Tools

I thought that McDonough’s article for this week was very informative of a problem that is easy to overlook. Being new to XML, I had no idea that the language’s being designed with variability in mind was making it difficult in terms of interoperability. It is an interesting point that different needs of different library communities are creating social differences in the use and the miscommunication of XML based tools.

I also felt that the author’s call for some sort of standardization runs a little counter to the entire philosophy of XML. As he says, “In the designers’ world view, a key benefit to XML is the freedom it provides users to define their own structure for documents and data, using their own semantics, and to escape restrictions software vendors might wish to impose on their users.” In this way, isn’t standardizing the language to some degree counterintuitive to its design? This is definitely an interesting problem, as I don’t know a potential solution, or even if one is required.

And maybe it’s the comic book lover in me, but I found Walsh’s article (look at all the superheroes!!!) to be very interesting. The idea that a language can be designed that is capable of examining documents with images and text is extremely beneficial for the future.

Reading the article, I kept thinking of the X-Men. As a comic book series, the comics are analogous for the American civil rights movement. This example demonstrates the literary value of such a markup language, but the use for exploring items such as tapestries or other historical documents is obvious. If a historical work makes heavy use of primary sources such as images or maps, an accurate digital rendition could easily live online, either by itself or as a complement to a monograph or other type of publication.

Endless Possibilities

Misc., Projects, Readings, Tools, Uncategorized

Just wanted to check in and see if anyone else Loves CSS and HTML. There is so much we can do with it and this is only the beginning. I think that learning webdesign has so much potential for the field of Public History. The “public” sees the world in these formats (i.e. web pages), so we should know how to show them history through the lens with which they are most comfortable. Accessibility is key here.

I do want to reiterate my earlier statements: I believe that this is the job of the Public Historian, not the Academic. We need trained professionals (digital historians) in academia to teach these skills for use by the public historian. It is easy to get lost in learning web design elements and lose what is important about what we are doing (or trying to do) as academics/professionals.

There is a great work that predates the digital revolution that is poignant to me as we work through these problems and you can access it here.

 

Now you may like this Christina!

Google Ngram

Tools

I played around a little bit with Google Ngram viewer . I am not sure yet what I am supposed to deduce, but it was fun to look at the graphs. I am a little bit uncomfortable with not knowing what the sources are, besides just being as many books as Google has digitized from the years 1800 to 2000.  This illustrates to me that I don’t yet know how data can inform my research.  I also looked at the about page, and then went to a wikipedia article to try to understand what an N-gram even is.  So much I don’t know!

Tools I Might Use, One I Have Used

Tools

I have worked with Omeka.  I worked with it in the UNR Libraries, Special Collections Department for their collaborative work on the Reno Historical app, found here.

I am interested in SIMILE, a digital tool to make timelines that you can move around in. Here is an example.  I often wish I had a timeline to reference for my research because I am a visual learner. I like to look at the big picture, and even though a timeline seems linear, you can see simultaneous events with the SIMILE version.

I have spent a little time looking around the website of the University of North Georgia Press, and read their whitepaper about getting University presses to engage in digital publishing. You can find it here.  I wonder if we might be able to generate interest in digital publishing at our own University press?