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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.]
