http://www.newsweek.com/id/170796?from=rss

The article begins,

“The Obama campaign developed powerful Web tools that might shape government but are more likely to build opposition movements, revolutions and possibly terrorist cells.”

Holly

There is lots of great information online.  One good article is from CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/11/10/gifts.that.give.back/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

This is the best part of the article: “Oxfam’s gift site, http://www.OxfamAmericaUnwrapped.com

offers to more than 57 charitable donations, including a pair of sheep ($90) that allow women to generate their own income by making textiles, a small business fund to help get entrepreneurs started ($100), and a veterinarian’s field kit ($35). Products are organized by price, with 28 options under $50, and recipients receive a card explaining what the donation will provide. http://www.UniversalGiving.org

 coordinates donations to more than 200 aid organizations, including East Meets West, Helen Keller International, and more.”

The sheep will be $90 well spent, I think!  I wonder if the pair consists of 1 male and 1 female so that they will hopefully result in more sheep?

Happy Holidays!

Holly

So I feel fortunate that I was required to take this class, as it has better prepared me for a career in history and teaching, and has taught new life skills such as not being afraid of new approaches and particularly of new technologies.  I also feel lucky to have been able to get to know each of you over the course of the semester—I really feel that our class was a great group of people and we all encouraged each other and created an open, welcoming atmosphere that fostered creativity and ingenuity.  I am very impressed with each student’s proposal for a digital historical resource, and I hope that all of you go on to actually develop these resources!  I think they would all be useful.  I will not be taking Clio II next semester due to a scheduling conflict, so I wish all of you the best of luck, not that you need it, I know you will do well, and I am looking forward to viewing the final projects online!  Thank you all for all of your help throughout the semester in blog comments and otherwise; I feel that all the class input has really strengthened my proposed website.  Sorry for being so sentimental and mushy, I always get nostalgic at the holidays and with the end of the year being a liminal time….

Anyway, on a lighter note, I was intrigued by an article in the Washington Post today entitled “Players Gamble on Security, Honesty of Online Betting.”  Here is the link to the essay: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/29/AR2008112901679.html?nav=rss_email/components

Apparently the Post is beginning a series of articles regarding online gambling, betting, and the like, and this article is the first of the series.  I found it fascinating partly because one of my Minor Fields for the PhD is Behavioral History, and a major growth area within that new discipline includes the study of histories of addictive behavior, such as gambling.  I know that may sound odd to some people, but actually such practices as gambling that are regarded as aberrant by much of society are actually practiced, at any given time, by many members of society, and regardless they serve as a useful analytical lens through which to appreciate and interrogate hitherto unknown areas of the past.  Some of the best and most enjoyable introductory books to these types of subjects, if anyone is interested, are Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History by John Burnham, Drinking In America: A History by Mark Edward Lender, and The Spirits Of America: A Social History of Alcohol by Eric Burns.  Yet while aspects of addictive behavior today such as drinking are perhaps more difficult to compare with the past, we can easily compare behaviors such as gambling, in large part because the advent of the Internet and other digital media and technologies appear to have drastically exacerbated the problem in the present-day, at least in terms of secrecy, scope, depth, and amount of money and number of individuals involved.  And this is where our class comes in—if anyone has time to skim the article, I think you will find in it many metaphors for our class this semester, in which we have examined aspects of new technology such as the impact of technology on scholarship and lived experience, and the impact of technology on culture and vice-versa (Lev Manovich et al).

So, as I said, if anyone has time to review the article, there appear to be many parallels and links between the phenomena in the article (such as gambling) and the phenomena we have discussed all semester, including ideas of scarcity versus abundance, as well as ideas of authorship, authenticity, and honesty.  Just as the players mentioned in the article grapple with issues of trust in the online gaming world, so scholars and members of the interested public must deal with issues of trust, such as when to trust online scholarship, and whether one’s website will experience copyright infringement.

Finally, on our last day of class perhaps we will have time to discuss, among other issues, the idea of how to conceptualize the Internet as a tool for historical research and analysis.  Of course we have been discussing these topics all semester, yet I hope that we can begin to draw some preliminary, necessarily basic, yet still useful conclusions about the nature of digital scholarship, including its production, distribution, and critical reception.  In a previous class I took on the History of the American West, we ended class with an article theorizing the Internet as, at times, a Wild West of sorts, and I think this can be a profitable metaphor, and one that ties in with other links such as gambling and lawlessness!  Due to the scholarly tendency to think in binaries, over the course of the semester we have addressed such themes of digital scholarship as Scarcity or Abundance, and I hope we can also address related themes such as the Internet as Dystopia or Utopia.  Here is the article that gave me some of these ideas: “The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier,” Helen McLure, The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 457-476, accessible via JSTOR link at: http://mutex.gmu.edu:2112/stable/pdfplus/970103.pdf

In regarding the Internet, and also digital scholarship, as Dystopia we can view it as an anarchic realm like the American Wild West, full of metaphorical cowboys and Indians, in which there is little accountability for information or little structure to organize knowledge. Or we could view the Internet and digital academia in a way akin to the movie Bladerunner, in a hyper-postmodern Orwellian futurist Dystopia in which we are all isolated from each other and replace human interaction with exchanges solely over a computer interface, and the over-abundance of knowledge results in information-overload.  We could also regard the advent of the Internet and digital history as a Utopia that will save academia from the fate of being increasingly irrelevant to the public, and will rescue history from seeming increasingly unrelated to the present-day, and particularly to the younger generations.  Of course these are generalizations formed to help us theorize, and neither extreme is likely, although I like to think that the Internet and related developments have more utopian tendencies than dystopian.

What does anyone else think?  Do you think Digital History and related developments in scholarship have more potential to enact positive than negative changes in the realm of History?  What about in the area of lived experience, as with the oft-quoted example that Obama will be President 2.0, and that his campaign was groundbreaking in part because it harnessed the power of new digital technologies to contact, inform, and mobilize the public?  Do you think that new digital technologies were an important part of this month’s Presidential Election?

I look forward to hearing what other people have to say on these matters, either via comments or in class tomorrow.  See you all on Monday!

Holly

Women

Holly M.

Toys and Playthings Gallery

Holly M.

Ceramics and Textiles Gallery

Holly M.

Children

Holly M.

I have been thinking hard about the excellent comments made by class members after my presentation, and all week I have been working on new mock-ups to reflect changes suggested by the class.  The mock-ups have been through many iterations, but I will post what are now the final versions…..these types of digital endeavors are not well-suited to those of us who are perfectionists……….

I think I will post each mock-up separately, as WordPress seems to respond to that better.

I am looking forward to the presentations tomorrow.  The materials posted so far regarding tomorrow’s presentations look very intriguing–I am excited to hear what others are working on for their project.

Holly

Current Homepage

Holly M.