Cohen presented some valid issues for collecting history online, such as there being no paper trail, questions of authenticity, and the use of technology that many people may not be familiar with.   Its hard to imagine these being issues for a long while because it just seems to me that like with other new technologies, the kinks will get worked out.   Furthermore, the benefits of born-digital definitely outweigh the negatives.  Its true, that not having a paper trail could jeopardize someone’s contributions for technical reasons, but as born-digital resources become even more commonplace, programs and methods will be devised to address these issues.  There will always be questions about new ways of doing things, but eventually, I believe the new technology will win out and born-digital historical resources will be created without major conflict.

The case study websites, including the Sept. 11 Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, exemplify how the recording of history is growing  and changing successfully.  It only makes sense that as the internet continues as an intrinsic part of our daily lives, the collection and dissemination of history becomes susceptible to that.  Getting public input on historical events is truly important – it gets them involved so they feel connected to history as opposed to being “told history” by someone who did experience an event as they did.

The fact that tagging and the study of tagging has its own technical name, “folksonomy,” shows just how significant this aspect is becoming as part of the digital world  and that people are serious about involving it in their digital projects.   Personally, I have never tagged anything; I considered it more of a social networking tool, and never really  considered the impact it could  have for digital history and the humanities.  However, one concept about tagging that struck me as notable is the idea of creating tags as an accessibility feature for everyday people (or online museum patrons), rather than needing to search by a museum’s own terminology.   Though it would allow a type of interaction between museums and patrons hasn’t been seen before,  folksonomy should consider effects that non-regulated tagging could have on the organization of the museum’s digital sites.  If everyone starts entering their own tags for an item, limitless tags would make the site more complicated, defeating the purpose of tagging in the first place.

I have a difficult time believing that museums will disappear to digitized versions.  Maybe in a few decades this will happen, but I think very strongly that a museum is a museum because of its public, physical location that requires one to leave their home in order to enjoy it’s collections.  You can digitize collections and view them online, but the experience of viewing those items in context will be lacking.  Like libraries, museums are part of a community, and that aspect cannot be replicated by digitization.   As digitization becomes even more prominent, museums will need to combine online exhibits and collections with good marketing, so that that website visitors will experience a sampling of collections digitally, only to be enticed to visit the museum in person to see the rest.

Libraries are such an important part of a local community.  Not only do they provide books and research materials, but also classes, lectures, and also materials on living in the community.  Moving towards digitalization means not only digitizing catalogs and books, but also providing those same community sources via the internet.

Digitizing historical resources, or any resources for that matter, seems like a kind of specialty art form.  Rosezweig and Cohen’s explanation of turning a book into a digital source and the amount of detail that needs to go into creating metadata to make the digital book usable leads me to feel that digitizing would be a successful profession for someone.   The amount of time and effort that goes into making sure  digital sources are properly handled, usable for the public and very importantly, authentic, makes the field deserving of a professional title and a salary.

There’s a difference between putting Oprah’s head on Ann-Margaret’s body or slimming down Katie Couric – that’s the entertainment industry and that’s what they do (not that its ok).  Removing Leon Trotsky from a photograph is a clear manipulation of history.  Doctoring history goes beyond just photographs, such as the Texas Board of Education’s new guidelines for history textbooks, or any other efforts to revise history so that a certain viewpoint gets across.   People have been obsessed with  manipulating history for who knows how long, whether for self-preservation or for dramatic effect.  During the Civil War, Mathew Brady and his photographers moved dead soldiers’ bodies around to put them in what they felt were more dramatic positions for the purpose of their photos (http://bit.ly/bJXyZd) .  I would consider that a form of doctoring a photograph and doctoring history.  As history becomes more and more digital, the threat of doctoring photos is going to become a huge threat to historians and researchers.

Regarding the case studies, I tried out the National Academics Press Reference Finder, and had a so-so reaction to the results.   You can copy/paste any text into it, and either have it extract key words for you (which I didn’t find very helpful), or ask it to find references or reports related to your text.  I copied what I had written so far for this blog post, and was given some not-so-helpful resources, such as books on the U.S. Military’s malaria vaccine program and books on U.S. banknotes, but also a book called Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age, which sounds like a fitting book for this course.   It seems that the site can be helpful at times, as a sort of hit-or-miss resource.

Just as with wikis and blogs, I don’t have very much experience with podcasts.  For an online summer course that I took two summers ago, the professor  recorded his lectures onto individual podcasts, which we then downloaded and listened to at our own leisure.  For the purpose of an online course, podcasts seem like a great resource.   We are getting used to having so many things available to us with just the click of a computer mouse, and podcasts naturally fit into that category.  In terms of disseminating information, specifically  historical information, I do think that podcasts can have an influence on how people learn history.  However, getting the idea of history-related podcasts out to the public and creating podcasts on relevant topics is the challenge.

Rosenzweig writes in “Scarcity or Abundance” that we eventually may need to “recreate the historical profession.”  The ACLS’s argument for cyberinfrastructre can be directly applied to this recreation of the history profession that Rosenzweig talks about in relation to history in digital form.  In the ongoing process of making history available digitally, whether it be online books, history blogs, digital photograph collections or digital exhibits, etc, etc., having a basic infrastructure on which to base increasing digitized history is crucial to the success of history in a digital medium.  The comparisons to everyday infrastructure is obvious – who wants to sit through tons of stop lights (too much traffic not moving) when you can spend much less time cruising the highway (still a lot of traffic but no traffic lights).   Infrastructure is key for any city or town to function properly, and the same goes for the internet.  Cyberinfrastructure, which will allow people to navigate the web to get where they need to go quickly and efficiently, is key for moving digital history forward successfully.  If we really do need  to digitally “recreate the historical profession,” having the basic building blocks in place is essential to get started and make sure history heads in the right cyber direction.

Rosenzweig made some other points that stood out to me.  The accumulation of digital data may end up overloading historians; thus, a new system for preserving the past is going to be needed.  Again, this brings up the point of how important digital infrastrucure is becoming as history continues to turn digital.

Is the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia really a Wiki if it restricts anyone who is not a “community scholar” from contributing?  I’m curious to know just how significant the public’s discussion page comments are to the scholars who write the entries.  I would also think that Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia scholars are not fans of Wikipedia’ anyone-can-edit attitude.  However, if I want to know something regarding Tom, I would definitely feel more comfortable using this site rather than Wikipedia, just because they do limit who can add and edit information.

At times I do like to quickly check on a historical event or concept that I come across in a book I might be reading for class – one example, the Monroe Doctrine, I came across this weekend but couldn’t recall the details.  A quick check on Wikipedia gave me the brief overview I was looking for, but is that entry correct – I hope so!  To solve this issue, I could easily have Google the Monroe Doctrine to find a more legitimate source; however for me, Wikipedia in this case was just more convenient.  I do applaud the democratization that wikis provide.  In relation to a bigger picture – in a world where the wealthy and connected people tend to be the ones to make decisions at all levels, the democratization provided by the internet – whether it be blogs, Wikis, YouTube, etc. – allows anyone to voice their opinions and make their input known. After these readings I’ve opened my mind a little bit more for Wikipedia -  not for academics, but for its successful effort at creating an online community of people who have a common interest in sharing their knowledge (though sometimes incorrect or insignificant) with the world.

Regarding the readings, Rosenzweig makes some points in his article that I think are worth mentioning.  First, addressing what others have expressed in other articles we’ve read, historians should seriously consider getting involved in the “democratization” of history on the internet.  Many historians scowl at unprofessional history sources such as Wikipedia, but  those same historians hide behind expensive academic journals that are barely accessible to anyone.  Wikipedia and other user-moderated sites don’t discriminate against those interested in expressing their thoughts and (sometimes questionable) knowledge about historical topics.  That leads to another issue in his article relating to education – that it’s easy for middle and high school students to get caught up in encyclopedia-type sources as their primary source for research purposes.  Jeremy Boggs attempts to address this in his lesson plans teaching students how to use Wikipedia properly.  More on that later.

Leahy’s article makes a lot of sense to me, with his description of “serendipitous” discoveries becoming so common because of internet searches.  He alludes to the future, foreseeing the internet as a vehicle for researchers to utilize digitized versions of out-of-copyright material, making research more accessible for topics such as Victorian history.  One observation of his that I don’t agree with is his prediction that researchers will soon avoid inconvenient materials, such as unpublished manuscripts.  This isn’t true as far as I’m concerned.  So many materials are too fragile to digitize, and there will always be those original copies tucked away in library archives that will require a trip away from your computer screen.

Cohen and Rosenzweig’s make a good point in their correlation between multiple choice and scantron sheets, and cell phones and learning history.  If we can expect the teaching of history to be evaluated by a machine with the press of a button, then can’t we expect the learning of history to come out of a machine with a few clicks?  It’s important for teachers to be interested in teaching history, so that their enthusiasm can be passed on to students.  This is an ideal place for digital history to be incorporated – not only do students get exposure to lesson plans that utilize more than text books and result in multiple choice exams, but I would imagine that it’s a more engaging type of lesson plan to create on teachers’ ends.

Regarding Jeremy Boggs Wikipedia research project, I don’t see the value in assigning Wikipedia entries as a history class assignment.  Yes, the students get experience in basic research.  And, it’s good in that students get experience in collaborative writing as Boggs claims;  however,  if any of these students are planning on becoming  historians or plan on going into another history-related field, they won’t encounter much collaborative writing in the future.  Boggs claim that students learn to discern between writing “just the facts” and analytical writing, to me, doesn’t have merit.  If he’s teaching a 100-level survey course, then shouldn’t these students  be working on assignments that will help them write analytically in higher level courses?  In no way does this assignment encourage students to form an argument and learn to support it.  Isn’t the point of learning history to go beyond “just the facts” and to instead analyze and evaluate existing scholarship and produce original research? This is a win-win for Wikipedia in that they are getting well-researched articles, but the students are not getting a worthwhile experience, in my opinion.

Marshall Poe lays out his strategy for fighting digital bad history with digital good history, and he makes some notable points.  Similarly to Dan Cohen, Poe plugs the blog as a way for professional historians to overcome shabby history with their expert insights.  Even though Poe offers a lot of suggestions, I think one of the most significant is the basic webpage.  If a webpage looks clean-cut and professional, and I know its written by a professional in the field, I’d be more likely to take it seriously.  I don’t think knowing that a professional has contributed to or edited a Wikipedia site would make me more likely to take it as a respectable source.  I had an undergraduate professor who constantly reiterated not using Wikipedia as a source, and I can’t seem to get that out of my head.

Cohen and Rozenzweig share  some “prophecies” made about the future of the digital world, which though seem exaggeraged, are not entirely wacky. The Wired UK editor commented how “books once hoarded in subterranean stacks will be scanned into computers and made available to anyone, anywhere, almost instantly, over high-speed networks” – which is essential the objective of Google Books.   And Gertrude Himmelfarb’s fear that the digital world  “does not distinguish between true and false” can be true in cases, as supported by Poe’s article that the web is full of “bad” history.  Those that felt history in a digital form would end up being a threat to cultural values, however,  might have been slightly paranoid.  The authors set the stage in their introduction for a structured approach to working with history in a digital medium, listing seven pros and five cons of digital  history.  Cohen and Rozenzweig make it clear from just the first parts of this book that digital history is a legitimate form of presenting history; and once you understand how to use the web properly for the purpose of history, I believe it will enhance the field more than limit it.