History697

Nice Background

I finally found the background that I have been looking for and interestingly enough it was created by our friends at CHNM for the Mary Washington site. Thank YOU!!! That was driving me crazy. My Image in the masthead needs to be smaller but I think I like the latest version of it because it looks like there is lots of snow. I might just have a hazy brain right now from being snowed in...The Type assignment is an incredible time sink-hole but I am slowly becoming more adept. Maybe...almost a novice. Back to work.

Snowblind

I haven't had much to say. I have been slowly working through problems with the type project through trial and error.

Instead I wanted to point to another cool digital source to suck more time out of your life. GIS. I am sure most of you know about this tool but I wanted to put a plug in for the Libraries because my colleague Joy Suh teaches people like me how to use this great tool. Here is her InfoGuide. It has tons of resources on it and I am learning to use this resource more myself. I was thinking that it could be interesting to map how many squirrel scalp bounties were paid out in Virginia between 1728-1742. (see David Hardin. Laws of Nature...Virginia Geographer Vol 22 n.2 Fall/Winter 1990))Not sure if it will make it into my site but one can never tell.

Also this is a great resource National Historical Geographic Information System to check out.

Well back to trying to get footnotes to work.

Academic writing on the Web

I have been following the interesting conversation on Lynn's blog regarding footnotes and it occurred to me that most of the people that write about this topic focus on the question of structure and/or content.

In my opinion there is another element to think about...context. The footnote is a product of academic scholarship, lots of people point this out. Therefore, it seems to me that looking at the reasons that works get published would be helpful.

The idea that scholarship is about the transmission of knowledge and new ideas is very trite to a librarian that with close to 8 million dollars/year in their medium sized state university library system. Publishing is a business. Web publishing, in the way we are using it is "free." Does being free diminish the value of an item? Some argue no. Content is king. I am not sure if that argument holds up beyond editorialized content in the blogosphere. The open source movement is very interesting and promising to a disillusioned librarian but I will wait and see how many leading academics turn to this model.

This leads to the real problem, as any nontenured faculty member will quickly inform us, the goal of the first academic book is, in part, to be tenured. Academia has not fundamentally changed their expectations for tenure. Most peer review committees would not seriously consider our web-sites as examples of scholarship because it is not peer-reviewed. For example at one extreme Professor Petrik's site demonstrates a valuable accumulation of knowledge over time. I would argue that if she was not already a full professor (producing traditional works of scholarship) she would not be afforded the opportunity to work on this type of scholarship.

Many traditional scholars, like Gertude Himmelfarb long for a day when an academic was left alone with their work. She is a serious scholar that looks back for a time where virtues were important and where scholarship, and scholars, were special. Those that do not share her vision are simply not serious scholars. Frankly, many in the academy see work like "digital history" as, extra, or ancillary to the real work of a historian. Thus the footnote remains trapped within the context of the environment of academia. Where those, like Himmelfarb, will long for the good old days when scholarship was special. Personally, I wonder if they were so good. There is lots more to say on this but I will let the academics say it...I better go back to the library and buy more books.

I just realized (duh) that I need to check and recheck the css and xhtml validation every time I make a change to the code. Putting in the button actually whacked out my html code with an error and experimenting with fonts led me to mislabeling an attribute. Oh Well. It is fixed now. I am playing with some images and fonts off-line. One issue is I have to change the link colors. I am also going to create file tabs but I need to read some more on the history of the West.

Holy smokes!!! I had some major issues this week. My laptop went into meltdown and I ended up going to the Apple store in Fair Oaks. They were helpful and got me going again but despite having back-ups I lost all my user data (because image was corrupted.) I did have most of my files backed up separately but non of the stuff from this class. Good thing I hadn't made much progress.
My site is up. http://mason.gmu.edu/~goberle
I see everything that is there as a placeholder. I put an image in as a background mostly because I like the colors and the light writing on the map. I also used an image in the sidebar as a placeholder. I had trouble but was able to make an inline list without bullets for my menu in a space below the header that I created. Will tweak more today. Want to find a way to add a caption and a footnote for the image.

Karelia-Sandvox

I have been playing around with the free download of Karelia's Sandvox Template tool. Our systems librarian used this when we needed to get a no brainer quick site up in less than a day. That was when EndNote was suing CHNM/GMU. The library had to find a way to communicate to users how to migrate their EndNote libraries into a generic format so that they could transfer it into the citation management tool of their choice. It is still up at http://citationmigration.gmu.edu/

Also see...http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/site_gallery/the_george_mason_university.html

It is really easy. I look forward to figuring out how to tweak these things.

I am regretting not ordering the Wyke-Smith book until last night. I am not sure if my suggestion about Saturday class irritated everyone. I did notice that according to PatriotWeb our class size reduced a bit.

Just an idea to deal with the nights we need to review each other...What if we come in on a Saturday instead of having class on Tuesday night? That would make sure everyone got feedback but we wouldn't have to stay until midnight. I don't know if this would work for everyone but thought I would throw it out there...

I just realized my link for AP Images didn't go through the proxy. The library subscribes to this database so don't buy any of these images (unless you want to own them as a n individual). The GMU Libraries has several of these types of resources. ANother is called the Biology Image Library. Go to the databases page and you can search by name.

Last night I mentioned the Safari book collection available from the Libraries. Also check out the AP Images database for images that you can use for your projects.
http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=http://apimages.ap.org/fronts/Default.aspx?sh=14