Found History

The digital humanities are well represented this week at the National Council for Public History annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. By my count, fully nine of the approximately ninety sessions, workshops, working groups, and posters are either entirely or partially dedicated to the web and other digital outlets for public history. This equals the nine digital history sessions on the program at the much (many times) larger American Historical Association in January.

Here’s the list with times and titles. Please consult the full program online [.pdf] for room numbers and participants (and please contact me if I left anyone out!)

Thursday March 11, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Jump Start Your Digital Project in Public History

Thursday, March 11, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Digital Curricula in Public History

Thursday, March 11, 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
History 2.0: Engaging the Public in History through the World Wide Web

Friday March 12, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Issues in Historic Preservation (including Cara Kaser on “Using Digital Tools in Historic Resource Surveys: The Oregon Survey Program”)

Saturday, March 13, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Publish, Share, Collaborate, and Crowdsource Collections: Zotero 2.0 For Public Historians

Saturday, March 13, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Community of Records in the Age of New Media: Family History as Public History

Saturday, March 13, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Poster – The Flushing Local History Project: A Digital Community Art Project and Archive

Saturday, March 13, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Poster – Yesteryear: Historical Blogs as Educational Tools

Saturday, March 13, 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Omeka: An Open Source Tool for Publishing Cultural Heritage Online

YouTube dropping IE6 support — At more than a week old, I suppose this doesn’t qualify as breaking news, but it’s still big news. According to Ars Technica, YouTube will cease to support Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 beginning March 13, 2010—that’s right, less than two weeks from today. To the delight of CHNM’s web developers, many schools, libraries, and cultural institutions have already started to transition away from IE6, though not as quickly as any of us would like. The decision to stop supporting the nearly decade old browser by one of students’ favorite websites will hopefully serve a further forcing function.

Like “Pin Tab” in Chrome? Try “App Tabs” for Firefox — One of my favorite things about Google Chrome is the “pin tab” feature, which allows users to keep frequently used web pages and applications “pinned” at the top left of the tabs toolbar. Now the App Tabs extension brings this same functionality to Firefox. Unfortunately, the extension doesn’t work with very many themes, so if you give it a try you may also want to download Strata40, which seems to handle it well. Both add-ons have been written in anticipation of Firefox 4.0, which is due at the end of this year and will include features and design elements of each.

The Rosenzweig Forum for Digital Humanities returns this month with a program entitled “Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities.” On Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Murray Room of Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, Tim Powell and Bethany Nowviskie will address and open a conversation about issues of cultural authority, intellectual property, innovation vs. sustainability, objectivity, and the need to think outside the academy’s walls.

Tim Powell directs digital archive projects for the Ojibwe Indian bands of northern Minnesota, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Tim will speak about a project entitled Gibagadinamaagoom (Ojibwe: “To Bring to Life, to Sanction, to Give Authority”) and how the focus on Ojibwe culture affects issues of intellectual property, open access, and the design of the interface, metadata, and database.

Bethany Nowviskie directs the University of Virginia Library’s efforts in digital research and scholarship, and is also associate director of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute. She will discuss a number of projects from UVA’s SpecLab, Scholars’ Lab, and NINES research groups related to the expression of subjectivity and perspective in interpretive digital environments.

Named in honor of our good friend Roy Rosenzweig, the Rosenzweig Forum is a collaboration of CHNM, the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.

The annual meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) is only six weeks away, and CHNM will be there in force. On Thursday, March 11, we will be running a working group to help “Jump Start Your Digital Project in Public History.” On Saturday, March 13, we will be running a special workshop on getting started with Omeka.

NCPH is one of my favorite conferences of the year, attended by some of the most interesting people working in history today. Check out the full program online at NCPH’s slick, new, WordPress-powered website. See you in Portland!

As a pretty heavy Twitter user, it may seem strange that I quit Facebook on account of privacy concerns. But two posts—one from ReadWriteWeb and another from the Electronic Frontier Foundation—together do a pretty good job of summing up my concerns. The first describes a Facebook quiz developed by the American Civil Liberties Union designed to show Facebook users exactly what kinds of information about themselves and their friends they’re sharing when they add applications to their profiles. The answer: basically everything. The second describes the latest set of changes Facebook has made it its labyrinthine privacy policies. Facebook implements these changes every couple of months by means of simple click-through agreements, and, as in this case, they’re almost always designed to convince users to allow increased public and commercial access to their personal data and that of their friends.

Everything on Twitter is right out there in the open. But that’s what I signed up for. Facebook, on the other hand, promises its users privacy, but (best case) does very little to protect it and (worst case) even seems ready to subvert it.

In an article about Kuali adoption, the Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Campus Computing Project director, Kenneth C. Green as saying,

With due respect to the elites that are at the core of Sakai and also Kuali, the real issue is not the deployment of Kuali or Sakai at MIT, at Michigan, at Indiana, or at Stanford. It’s really what happens at other institutions, the non-elites.

Indeed, all government- and charity (read, “foundation”)-funded open source projects should measure their success by adoption at the “low end.” That goes for library and museum technology as well; we could easily replace MIT, Michigan, Indiana, and Stanford in Mr. Green’s quote with Beinecke, Huntington, MoMA, and Getty, Though we still have a long way to go—the launch of Omeka.net will help a lot—Omeka aims at just that target.