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ECHO Blogging Central

A Commonwealth of Diverse Cultures - Poland’s Heritage internet project

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
Commonwealth of Diverse Cultures: Poland’s Heritage is an international, educational exhibition which presents the history of tolerance and cohabitation of various ethnic groups in the territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Site designed by huncwot was made for National Library of Poland and polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Part of the Armenian collection Project is ...

Citizen historians discover the historical mystery of the birch inscription

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
In 1896 Danz, a forester from Gdansk, made an inscription from the trees in the Oliwa forest. Among pines and spruces he planted birches is such way, so they made an inscription "DANZ 1896". As Gazeta.pl writes, his work could be seen till the beginning of 20th century. After the WW2 ...

HistoriaiMedia.org launches a new tiny RSS tool for digital historians

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
Feeds is our new tiny tool for all RSS-readers interested in topics of digital history. In this project hundreds of RSS sources from digital history blogs is being put into one feed after the appropriate selection (we want to show most interesting news and resources). Using the base of RSS sources ...

After dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83) and Chile (1973-1990). Visual representations of collective experiences: documentaries, comics and shortfilms on youtube.com

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
The history of Latin America is full of mysteries and unspoken tragedies. This continent suffered by the dictatorships, by unstable governments or by military juntas. The most visible fact of analysing the history of this region is that tragedies affected the simple families, whose members were murdered in unclear circumstances. ...

Unique collection of Warsaw Uprising Mail returns to Poland

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
Almost all of polish newspapers alarmed about the german auction in Duesseldorf, where famous collector Manfred Schulze put over 120 exhibits consisting of stamps, envelopes and private letters. Finally, this unique collection of Uprising's souvenirs was bought by the Warsaw Uprising Museum for 190.000 Eu, which was an opening price. Big ...

Earn as a professional knight

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
Historical reenactment and living history projects become in Poland more and more often commercial concepts. We have written about the brand new castle bulit near Opole. Every year medieval events such as Grunwald Battle are not only a chance for discovering and commemorating history, but also to make money on ...

History Carnival #61

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
It is a time for publish another edition of monthly historical posts round-up. First of all, we would thank for all the submissions and remind you that the next edition of History Carnival will be hosted on 1 March at Spinning Clio. Sport arena may become a territory of an ...

Museum big as a half of polish province

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
People visiting this museum don't need special slippers, because they don't even look at the exhibits closed in the glass. In this case, it is usefull to have a notebook connected to the internet and to use GPS. Visitors walk through the forests of łódzkie voivodship, from Koluszki, to Krośniewice ...

Andrzej Wajda’s “Katyn” has been nominated for Oscar

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
The newest Andrzej Wajda’s movie Katyn has been nominated for Oscar in the category of the best foreign language film of the year. Wajda got an Oscar for Life Achievement in 2000. Katyn describes the history of the massacre of Polish officers in 1940. Taken prisoner by the Red ...

Jožin z bažin and archaeological function of YouTube

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
One of the most popular video among polish internet users now is a czechoslovakian song from 1978 titled Jožin z bažin (eng. Joe from the bog). English translation of the lirics one can find here. This song was showed even in the television news There are also many remixes of ...

Tomasz Szarota about the bounds of historical reenactment shows

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
In this year there is a 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising outbreak. As gazeta.pl writes, a one of the Warsaw historical reenactment group plans to prepare a performance showing fights of Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW) and Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) against german ...

Mythmaking and its role at forming collective identity: jugoslavian, german and polish case

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
In understanding some social processes of the past, historians and social antropologists focus their attention on mythmaking as an essencial process of creating social identity. For last years, myths are not only defined by dreams and projections known from psychoanalisic discourse. They are perceived as immanent element of looking ...

History Carnival #61: Call for Submissions

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
We are very glad to maintain the first History Carnival hosted at the primary non-english-language blog. Our aim is to promote the idea of carnival among historical bloggers from the new countries, show how history can be described and experienced also by them and - of course - make a ...

Film as a way of representing history

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
In the polish academic internet magazine Kultura i Historia one can find the article by Piotr Witek (PhD on the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin) about film as a one of the most important contemporary ways of representing history. The text is available in english in the Creative Commons licence, ...

Jimmy Wales about using Wikipedia in school researches

Historia i Media - 9 hours 4 min ago
Via The Wired Campus it can be found an article from BBC pages titled Students 'should use Wikipedia'. In his text Alistair Coleman presenting the problem of using Wikipedia in a school and academic research. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said teachers who refuse younger students access to the site are ...

Give Omeka a Try

Dan Cohen - Thu, 05/08/2008 - 19:06

If you’ve been interested in CHNM’s Omeka software but would like to try it before you buy it (for $0 since it’s open source), there’s now a demo version for you to check out. While you can already find many examples of Omeka in action on the web, the sandbox allows everyone to play with the administrative interface behind Omeka, including collections management and exhibit construction. That back end is, of course, as well designed as the front end due to our great design and development team.

More Matters of Great Historical Import

Old is the New New - Thu, 05/08/2008 - 18:00

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

I know this was linked in the last Carnivalesque, but I don’t think a solution has yet been found. The American historical profession must step up to the plate if we are to call ourselves historians: Why are there so many peeing dogs in historical prints of the American Revolution?

The Bowery Boys, a great weblog about Big Apple history, celebrates the arrival of Grand Theft Auto IV: Old People Beware with the history of New York City in video games from Donkey Kong on down.

In “The Paranoid Style is American Politics,” Reason, 24 April, Jesse Walker turns not to Richard Hofstadter but Bernard Bailyn to survey paranoia in American politics from the Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati to the current presidential contest between the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster, a secret Muslim Communist Republican, and a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong.

In “Well, it’s very bad history!” TV writer and producer Denis McGrath reviews HBO’s John Adams and makes a sensitive case for emotional truth over strict accuracy in historical film.

And what do you think was “the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise”? According to Clay Shirky, it was the sitcom. The equivalent technology for the previous century? Gin! (Hat tip to Sharon Howard and my non-blogging buddy Sean.)

You Are Number 0110

Old is the New New - Thu, 05/08/2008 - 17:10
English Village to be Invaded in Spybot Competition

A village in south-west England will shortly be swarming with robots competing to show off their surveillance skills. The event is the UK Ministry of Defence’s answer to the US DARPA Grand Challenge that set robotic cars against one another to encourage advances in autonomous vehicles. The MoD Grand Challenge is instead designed to boost development of teams of small robots able to scout out hidden dangers in hostile urban areas. [Read more.]

You have to get to the third paragraph to learn that the village is in fact a mock East German village built for urban warfare training during the Cold War. Insert Prisoner reference here.

Non-engaged Blogging and Reimagining Social Networks for the Blogosphere

Data Mining - Thu, 05/08/2008 - 14:56

The discussion over the definition of blogging is as old as the practice itself. For some all a blog is is a publication mechanism - thus any use of that mechanism is blogging; for others it is a certain publication and interaction behaviour through the web. One aspect of the application of social media infrastructure that I'm becoming more aware of is the level of engagement. For example, a typical blogger may write posts that link to other bloggers, and is likely to follow up with comments posted on their own blog. In addition, such a blogger may well respond to posts that link to their blog via the comments on that other blog or via posts on their own blog. Such an individual is engaged in the blogosphere.

At the other extreme, we have those who write blog posts that never link to other bloggers and, though they may receive a large number of comments, don't respond to these comments via their own commenting system. Such an individual is, we might say, a non-engaged blogger. Another example of this being the tweeter who has plenty of followers but who never issues an @'d tweet.

While the definition of blogging may still be in debate, the behaviours above can certainly be determined from pretty clear signals automatically. I'm guessing that someone has already done this analysis - anyone know of a paper?

An area of social media research that this measure has impact on is social network analysis. Typically, when inducing a social network from blog data, researchers look for reciprocal links. However, many political bloggers, while being of the non-engaged type, catalyze discussion in other blogs, or even simply within the many comments that each of their posts receive. Thus, one might argue, the simple notion of a tie between nodes should be abandoned for a model that can capture the different types of behaviour precipitated by different types of applications of social media publication technology.

I've long be suspicious of the wholesale adoption of real world social network analytics applied to social media, and blogging in particular (just as I am skeptical of the use of terms like 'conversation' when applied to this data). The above ideas, to me, seem to capture something of the reason for this discomfort.

Digital Campus #26 - Free for All

Dan Cohen - Thu, 05/08/2008 - 14:53

On this episode of the Digital Campus podcast we wrestle with how to keep open access/open source educational resources and tools sustainable for the long run. Mills elaborates on some of his ideas about a “freemium” business model for higher ed, and Tom and I explain the dilemma from the perspective of large academic software projects. We also debate whether laptops are a distraction in the classroom, among other topics in the news roundup and picks of the week. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

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