Digital History is "the use of digital media for historical practice, presentation, analysis and research." the definition of the term is difficult to define as it rapidly emerged and led to new methods and formats being developed. However, the term can be identified by the representation of historical content which can be accessed to the general public on the internet.

These posts on digital history were created during one of my final year undergraduate modules, "Digital Histories." Digital History has become much more prevalent and this module let us explore how the past is being represented on the internet and whether or not this poses significant problems in the writing of academic history. 

As a profession, historians have traditionally  avoided sharing their work and the writings of history with the general public; for fear it will disturb the epistemological foundations of writing history. This is because historians tend to believe that only they can objectively write history and so the profession has retreated to within academic institutions, journal articles and within academic publications. As David Starkey once stated in 2002, History today is, 

"a private conversation amongst dons in academic cloisters."  

Some historians have tried to resist this by engaging with the public and writing books to appeal to popular taste or share their historical knowledge through television and the internet. Due to the large increase in history data, documents and academic work being posted online the module explored whether or not books hold more authority than the internet or whether the internet holds just as much authority. The following blog posts in this page were written whilst I undertook the module.

Online Contribution Reflection

In the words of Tamwar Lewin “in a digital future, textbooks are history.”¹ Websites such as Blogspot and Twitter are essential media tools that enable historians to freely share their ideas to a worldwide audience over the internet. They have also been essential tools in the undertaking of my ‘Digital History’ module. Blogspot has given me a platform to voice my musings on certain subjects and alongside this Twitter has allowed me to ‘tweet’ to my followers whenever I have updated my blog. Twitter has also been effective in keeping up to date with any advances within the ‘Digital History’ community both inside and outside the class. With each person on the course starting a blog we were able to comment on each other’s blog posts and voice our own views.

Prior to week one of my ‘Digital History’ course I had never even written in a diary, let alone a blog. Writing on Blogspot has not only enhanced my writing and knowledge of digital history but has also changed the nature of my writing in academic essays. By writing on Blogspot I have begun to push the boundaries of artistic license in my academic essays. For example, as Blogspot is available to the public I have had to take into account the readability of my writing and I feel that this has improved throughout the module. To some extent I have also incorporated some of the skills of “blogging” into my dissertation. When faced with a difficult theory to explain in the opening chapter of my dissertation I was able to break the theory down and describe it in a way that would be engaging and easy to understand to any person who read it. Reading history on blogs and Twitter has arguably been much more accessible, insightful, and more engaging than any journal article or book.


^{1. T. Lewin, ‘In a digital future, textbooks are history” Published in New York Times, August 8 2009, found on http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?pagewanted=all accessed 24 April 2012 ↩}

The Nature of History Writing

"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it" ~ Oscar Wilde

This blog post is primarily about my essay which is ready to be submitted tomorrow. Come to think of it.. This is the last major essay I will ever have to  submit (apart from my dissertation, of course)! 

To upload my essay I decided I would do it in the following way... I first converted it into a PDF file, I then uploaded into Google Documents. From there I clicked 'share' to obtain a web link. Once I copied the web link I put it into a hyper link (which can be found just below in blue) this will take you to a separate window containing my essay.. Hopefully. 

So here you go, it can be opened by clicking directly on the hyperlink -------> How does "the digital" change the nature of history writing.

Enjoy!






Picture credit: http://www.eurthisnthat.com/2010/03/17/texas-re-writing-history-without-hispanics-and-blacks/

The Wisdom of the Crowd

"The wisdom of the crowd is the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question"



The entry for Franklin D Roosevelt in Wikipedia "emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits." The term wiki refers to a multi-user collaborative website and in this case academic historians do not necessarily write its content. Wikipedia contains 21 million articles and encourages a large group of people to make numerous edits to every single article. This means it has become perhaps the largest work of online historical writing. Compared to traditional forms of knowledge Wikipedia relies on the process of the 'wisdom of the crowd'; a belief that the knowledge of a group of people can often be of more value than the knowledge of a single person. Wikipedia has has been described in an article by Roy Rosenzweig as being the most important application of the principles of the free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural, rather than software, production.

In a video on youtube, Marcus du Sautoy explains how a group of people can collectively know more than one individual. In 1906 the mathematical research was originally done on a group of people at a village fair, guessing the weight of an ox. Although, no single individual guessed the correct weight, the average of all of their answers was correct. Furthermore, it was also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts. Indicating, the Wisdom of the Crowd.

In this recent BBC research, Sautoy filled a large jar with jellybeans, 4510 jellybeans to be exact. He then asked 160 people how many jellybeans they thought were in the jar. When asking people to guess the amount, the answers ranged from a mere 400 to a staggering 50,000. In an amazing result. Sautoy finds that collectively, the average guess, to the nearest bean was 4514. Only four jellybeans away from the correct answer.

This shows that although some people overestimated the amount, just as many underestimated the amount and therefore cancel each other out. Provided you ask enough people, just as Wikipedia has millions of editors, the wrong answers will cancel each other out. Leaving information that is just as creditable as a single persons knowledge.



Picture credit - http://www.miratelinc.com/blog/corporate-social-responsibility-it-starts-with-people/

The woman who stole the milk

One woman who I have always wanted to study and research is Margaret Thatcher. To be totally honest I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps because she is such an iconic woman in British Politics, earning herself the title 'Iron Lady.' But yet, I have never really come across her in any history module through GCSE, A level or University. For my 5,000 word piece of coursework at A level I really wanted to write about her. However, because she was active through the 1970s and 80s, not enough time had passed for any significant amount of historiography to have happened. Because of this, I was told that I could not choose her as a topic.

So, because I have a blog and because I have completed a sufficient amount of work today I decided I would do my own little bit of research on Margaret Thatcher and create a blog. Two preconceptions I have of Margaret Thatcher is that she:-

1. Caused the miner's strike (I learnt this from Billy Elliott) 
2. and ended free milk in schools for children over the age of seven (I learnt this from the bitter people I know over the age of around 40).

Thatcher was born in October 1925 and is the longest serving British Prime Minister, serving from 1979 to 1990. She became a member of parliament for Finchley in the 1959 general election and in 1970, Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science. After winning the 1979 general election Thatcher became Prime Minister. What appeals to me about the study of Thatcher is how perceptions of her are so divided among people.When the time comes, Thatcher will receive a state funeral which is a rare honour. For some, her death will be an occasion of great joy, however, for others it will be a time of grief.

Even in 1978, one year before Thatcher became Prime Minister, Denis Healey, a British Labour politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer began to impose tight monetary controls and deep cuts were made in public spending on education and health. These public spending cuts led to a wave of strikes and the Labour Party were defeated by the Conservatives in the 1979 general election. In Thatchers first year as Prime Minister inflation was reduced, but unemployment doubled and in 1981, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced further spending cuts. At this time, opinion polls declared Thatcher as being the most unpopular prime minister in British History.

Thatcher would become even more unpopular with those who worked as a miner in the mid 1980s. At this time it was announced by the Conservative government that they intended to close 20 coal mines. 20,000 jobs would be lost and communities in the north of England, Scotland and Wales would lose their primary source of employment. As a result of this, miners in various coal fields began strike action. The strike lasted almost a year but was unsuccessful and as a result Thatcher had managed to destroy the strength of the Trade Unions.

I have come across Thatcher briefly in my own dissertation. Due to there being no censorship over journalism in the Vietnam War and America suffering a severe defeat, Thatcher was adamant to handle things differently during the Falklands War. The Falklands War represented a sharp shift in media restrictions during a military conflict. Thatcher's triumph in handling the press and liberating the Falkland Islands in 1982 set the seal on Britain reclaiming its status as a major world power. Argentine dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri ordered forces to invade the islands believing that Britain did not have the strength to defend the interests of a remote collection of small islands. Dictator Galtieri could not have been more wrong.

 

Thatcher on a tank. I chose this, because it's awesome.

Photo credit: google.com/images

Trove

So this blog is primarily about the website Trove. But first! I would like to comment on my Google Analytics. After not really checking my Google analytics for a while, I thought I would take a quick look today. Google Analytics allows me to track who is looking at my blog, from what country etc. Today I saw that I have a number of views from people in America, more specifically that I have 3 views from Charleston, Illinois! Not only this, but they spent an average time of 7 minutes and 25 seconds on my website! Now obviously this could be a complete mistake on the part of the viewer. But in my own little naive world, I'd like to pretend that someone in America is actually interested in what I have to say. I'm really enjoying using Google Analytics and it's a great way of viewing statistics of who is viewing your blog!

Anyway! back to Trove. As part of our assessment, we have been asked to write a 500 word critique on a Digital History website. At first I was a bit dubious about posting it on here and to be honest I have no idea why. So! here is my (not quite) 500 word critique. It is only a first draft and so it is not in its final form as of yet.

My Critique! 

Trove is a federated search engine that was launched by the National Library of Australia to the public in 2009 to gather material related to Australia. This site provides metadata for over ninety million items. It is a ‘federated’ site, which means that it centralises material and collates it from one thousand libraries via the Australian National Bibliographic Database. This is opposed to a unified catalogue, which is a single data catalogue that gives the user unrestricted access to all stored resources. Trove uses OAI-PMH, which is a web-based protocol that defines a standard way to move records between resources. It allows Trove to request records from a system in batches, the results are returned in XML format. A wealth of digital content is then produced and catalogued using a standard set of vocabulary terms defined by Dublin Core. From the digital metadata tags, material is separated into eight different zones; all view, books, photos, newspapers, sound, diaries, maps and organisations. Currently, the site holds 134,283,381 Journals and articles as well as 63,693,069 digitalised newspapers.[1] Trove has an excellent interface, which is aesthetically pleasing and laid out in a logical user-friendly fashion.

Fig 1: Homepage of Trove, http://trove.nla.gov.au 

 

When searching for books, Trove will group together multiple items and different editions together instead of displaying only one record. Trove achieves this by using FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records), an approach to cataloguing, which takes into account the searching for different copies and specific editions. Figure 2 demonstrates how the different versions/editions of the work are displayed.[2]

                   Fig 2: The versions of the work. Found on http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/holley/03holley.html

 Trove’s material is derived from other organisations and museums, which may have their own access restrictions. Although Trove can take some steps to improve the interface usability, a large percentage of the responsibility falls on the contributing organisations. Some material advises the user to contact the publisher directly or purchase the item.  Trove uses the Australian Libraries Gateway (ALG) to source the library names. It also added ‘short library names’ (Fig 3) to the ALG which received positive feedback from users [3] However, when Trove undertook usability testing, it showed that “users expected to be able to borrow from any library listed in Trove,” even though many libraries have access restrictions.[4]

Fig 3: Short library names, found on http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/holley/03holley.html

One part of the project involved the digital cataloguing of scanned documents such as newspaper articles. These have been translated electronically into text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and although OCR is usually very accurate, the small font and uneven printing makes conversion difficult. Due to these conversion difficulties, more than 5,000 online users have manually corrected the text themselves.[5] This is an excellent example of crowdsourcing. The manager of Trove, Rose Holley, states that over two million lines of text are corrected every month.[6] However, work still needs to be carried out on some of the older newspapers and archives that OCR has failed to correctly read. 

Trove is a great example of how history can be presented online and the website has a number of great successes. However, it needs to improve its ability to obtain the material from its contributing sites. Furthermore, a percentage of its photos that are available are of poor quality, presumably to discourage users from using the image for their own use.

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[1] Statistics taken from http://trove.nla.gov.au/system/counts <accessed, 09/03/12>
[2] Rose Holley, ‘Resource sharing in Australia: Find and get in Trove – making “getting” better, information and diagram found on http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/holley/03holley.html <accessed 10/03/12>

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] National Library of Australia, ‘Online text correctors to be honoured’ posted 27^th January 2010 on http://www.nla.gov.au/media-releases/online-text-correctors-to-be-honoured <accessed 09/03/12>

[6] Rose Holley, ‘Crowdsourcing and social engagement in libraries: the state of play’ found on http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/16385/1/Crowdsourcing%20State%20of%20Play%20June%202011.pdf <accessed 10/03/12>

Photo Credit: http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/gateways/issues/104/trove.html