Well, George and Dan, I don’t have my type assignment up yet, but hope to by tomorrow noon-ish, si dios quiere. In the meantime, I think I have such a collossally messy portfolio page that it should provide you with plenty of options to offer suggestions for improvement. I dare you to untangle what I have done!!!
Archive for February, 2010
Post #8. Peer Review
February 22, 2010Post #7. Learning new languages
February 16, 2010Hey anyone,
I finally have a portfolio up, http://race-in-colonial-mexico.net/.
There are a bazillion things I can think of doing to make it better, but if you have any ideas, I’d appreciate them. I’m swinging between the “fear-of-computer-exploding” phase and the “Wow-I can’t-believe-I did-that” phase.
This is as painful and as fun as learning a new language through complete immersion. But where’s the travel, the food, the ancient sites? Learning new languages usually offers a lot of collateral benefits that help you get through the pain…
Post #6. Naming things
February 16, 2010The Polyglot blog re-works some of the ongoing debates about digital humanities: should academics should get involved in digital publishing; what’s worth publishing; what kinds of publishing can you do on the web; who the audience will be for all of this, and a call for all historians by becoming technically literate enough to put their work on the web.
I think of a website as a verb, in action, doing things, but of course, there are the people making that all work. It can be changed on the fly. It is available for an infinite number of people to see. Paper publishing, to me, is much more of a noun. A final product is created, it may get shipped around and shared, but generally speaking only one person can use it at a time. While there was input and process up to the point of publishing, once published, it won’t change.
The Polyglot encourages historians to become familiar with digital techniques in order to open up scholarship to a wider public. One problem I see with his examples is that they don’t challenge academics to think in new ways. Yes, adding hyperlinks and annotations is different, but it is not clear whether he thinks that adding more information is always good. He doesn’t discuss the historians’ role in filtering through tons of material to create a coherent narrative, or whether historians should abandon narrative altogether. I don’t see a change in academic perspective, but rather, a claim that we can add more and make it better if we put it on the web.
Can you get tenure for discussing ideas on your blog, rather than publishing a print article? Why is one format favored over the other? I think these kinds of questions really disturb the standard academic standards. What about if they maintain a website—does that count as publishing an article, or a book? But more importantly, if digital humanities require academics to keep up with the latest via online conversations and websites, what will happen to academics who don’t want to participate in those kinds of conversations? Will they fall behind, become uninformed, be left out of online conferences? I’m guessing that these are some of the anxieties that are underneath squabbles about the usefulness of annotations or hyperlinks.
But this blog was written in 2006, long before the power of social media took off. So what Polyglot didn’t know back then is that the web could become a place of interaction, where ideas are discussed, rather than a delivery mechanism. What academics should be concerned about is whether or how their fields are changing because of new digital possibilities.
I don’t think anyone should be forced to do digital history. At the same time, it seems that academics need to figure out how to value contributions of their colleagues, for both their digital and print work, and work out new guidelines for tenure accordingly.
Commented Upon
February 4, 2010Here’s a tally of whose blogs I’ve commented upon so far:
Post #5. Eating Crow
February 2, 2010Well, um, in addition to my really bad advice to fellow classmates, I just looked back at the w3c tutorials, and realize that they pretty much do exactly what I think would be most helpful: showing xhtml on the left, css on the right, and a rendering on the bottom. Plus the “Try this” exercises everywhere have code on the left, and image on the right, letting you see exactly how your edits affect the image. Guess I’m going to be eating a whole lot of crow this week.
See any of the w3c tutorials for examples.
Yum
Post #4. In this week’s dream world
February 1, 2010Maybe I should save up my dreams for later. But for right now, here they are.
It’s great when people show the code needed line by line, but it would be even better if there were a picture of the code rendered, so we could actually see what it is doing. In my fantasy world, it would be nice to be able to reverse engineer from a representation or rendering (not code). In other words, just like you have the option to see having source code, you could also have the option to see just text and images like the website, and could click on an item to see how that effect was achieved, pertaining to both the html and the css.
Another thing that exists in my dreamworld is a compatibility chart. It lists all the different types of browsers (and automatically kepps track of a range of browers giong back 5 years to catch all those who have not upgraded) and the configurations that make them capable across all platforms. Better yet, it would be a database where you could say you wanted to use Century Schoolbook 12, and ask which browsers might not render that correctly, and also list work-arounds. This, too, would be automatically updated to cover all fonts installed in all computers of the past 5 years. Do developers really just know all this stuff? How do they keep up to date?
Final item, which I don’t think is that dreamy. I realize that most of us are on information overload right now. But at some point I would like to learn what things need to be considered in designing a site for accessibility. Ultimately, I think we should build accessibility into the design right from the beginning, rather than trying to patch things up later. W3C does not (yet) have a validator for accessibility, but they do have a Web Accessibility Initiative page.
