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/