Alex Kelly Oct. 30 Social Media

The first reading today focused on social media and how its uses and prevalence in today’s society is rapidly growing. Millions of people use twitter to communicate and it is quite possibly the most widely used form of communication online today. The article discusses how teachers can use twitter to communicate with their students and provides some basic guidelines on the dos and don’ts of doing it. I believe that twitter is an effective tool for communication between teachers and students and efforts should by made on both ends to use it.

The second article discuses how social media can be used to further the goals of public historians. Museums are quickly growing their use of social media outlets such as Facebook and twitter. I believe that these social mediums can help to expand the audience of these institutions. Because of their popularity today they can help bring public history to a much wider audience.

The third article talks about how sifting through all of the information that people put on social media websites. It is a difficult task because there are millions of tweets and Facebook posts everyday. They can however be used to understand what people at the time are thinking and how they respond to the events of their time. In this way they are a very useful historical resource. Charts and graphs can add a visual component to this research. I believe that chronicling everyone’s social media posts has many benefits to the discipline of history.

The final reading talks about how Clemson University has established a social media listening center with help from Dell. I think this was a great move for the university because social media is the future of communication. It was an excellent idea for Clemson to do so because it will help the university remain relevant in the field of social media. Chronicling people’s social media posts will almost undoubtedly prove to be historically useful sometime in the near future.

Alex Kelly Oct. 23 Digital Presentation and Communication

The first reading is stresses the importance of knowing the content of what is going to be on your website before you put it online. It is very easy for someone to misinterpret what you say if you do not clearly explain what you mean. This is why it would be important to outline a plan for the development of your website before its construction. If you can put together a decent road map of what you are hoping to put into your website then you will be able to produce a much more effective end result. It is also detrimental to your website to put false information on it because it detracts from your credibility. Plagiarism online is also a fairly sticky subject because it is a totally different world with digital information as opposed to traditionally published books. The standards for using others work do still apply in the digital world but are not necessarily as clearly defined as in the book publishing one. Additionally, email is a very effective digital communication tool. It is one of the most popular forms of communication today and it will continue to expand its reach, as the world gets more digitized.

            The second reading talks about how the digital tools available to us today make it much easier to accomplish what would have previously been next to impossible to do. The article mentions how in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina tools such as Google Earth were able to clearly highlight the devastating effects brought by the storm in a way that would have previously necessitated many before and after aerial photographs. This would fall into the collecting content area of website development. Other critical aspects of a good website would be dealing with technical issues and attracting viewers to your website. These are simple concepts that if taken seriously when building a website can greatly increase the chances of that website’s success.

            I was unable to locate the third reading on the assigned website.

Alex Kelly Oct. 16 Project Blog

I am blogging today to update you on the progress that I have made with my digital history project. Over fall break I was able to make a trip to historic downtown Roswell and did learn a little about the construction of GA 400. The project’s development began in the 1950s and was completely approximately 20 years later. The growth that was brought on by its completion was substantial and a great deal of industrial and residential development was the outgrowth of the completion of this new highway. I am still trying to decide how I want to visually demonstrate the changes that this road brought to the north metro Atlanta area. I want to show how the areas serviced by the road expanded in population after its completion and I am still contemplating the best way of achieving this end.

Alex Kelly Oct. 9 Oral History

The first article gives a brief description of what oral history is and how it can be useful in conveying past events. Oral history has been around since the dawn of man and it has always been the way that the vast majority of people learn history. It is the main way that people who are not academics get their historical information. It came into its own in a more current fashion in the 1940s when Allan Nevins defined it in a modern context with the help of his contemporaries at Columbia University. This was a spectacular development as it has led to an increased awareness of historical events in relation to how those events are documented. Modern oral history in the United States focuses on analyzing first hand accounts of great historical events such as the Civil War or events predating that such as Native American folklore. In other places such as Europe oral history has been used to chronicle such cataclysmic historical events as the Holocaust. The benefits of maintaining and seeking to broaden the discipline of oral history are quite evident and I think that all historians should attempt to understand the necessity of learning from oral history.

The second article emphasizes the changing nature of history in that it has shifted from periods such as post revisionist into the digital age. Today digitizing history has made it much more freely accessible to people in all walks of life. Basically anyone with a computer and Internet access has more historical knowledge at their fingertips than anyone person could ever cram into their brain. Another interesting caveat about the article is that it seems to suggest that oral history is becoming more and more international. That is to say that countries all across the globe are realizing the importance of oral history and as a result, are placing much greater emphasis on the understanding of the subject. I believe that this is great and it needs to continue because oral history is the forerunner to the digital history we know and love today. If we hope to continue the progress that we have made in the field of history then we need to understand where it all came from.

The third website was very interesting to me because it contained many different databases containing oral histories from various points in the past. I think that having links to all of these banks of knowledge is one of the best ways to combine the fields of oral and digital history. Learning about civil rights in Mississippi is something that one can do by reading a book. But if I really want to know what it was like there in the 1960s, I find it helpful to have a firsthand account of the people who were there.

Alex Kelly Oct. 2 Websites

The first reading discusses how a person goes about setting up a website containing historical materials. There are many options that one has when attempting such an undertaking. It is important to understand the pros and cons associated with different website building techniques. Programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage are good tools that can be used to build a basic website but they are not necessarily the optimal software that one building a website that focuses primarily on history. The thing about historical websites is that they typically contain documents that were not necessarily originally in digital form. Some tools that can be used to digitize documents are scanners and OCR programs. Additionally one can simply do it the old fashioned way and type documents word for word into their website. The disadvantages of typing are quite evident in that it would take a person much longer to sit and type out pages and pages of historical documents. The scanners and OCR programs can do this in a fraction of the time. Website design is a key element of presenting history digitally because the way in which the information is communicated greatly changes how it will be perceived by the person viewing the website. I believe that as a historian attempting to build a historical website great care must be taken in the presentation of the information.

The second reading illustrates how a person needs to take great care in how they present themselves online. In a way the things people do online are extensions of themselves. A person’s Facebook or twitter are simply digital profiles of the person that they represent. It is quite easy for information that a person displays online to be misinterpreted by the people viewing it. And anyone with a computer and Internet access is a potential view. It is essential that people understand what they are communicating when they make Internet postings and they need try to make crystal clear as best they can what they mean by these postings. I feel like many people put material online without serious giving serious consideration to what the impacts on them could be.

The third reading is a real eye opener because it brings up the very valid point that although most people today can easily navigate around a website they still know almost nothing about website design. If people knew more about how to design and build a website I feel like it would give them a greater appreciation for the websites that they peruse on a daily basis. It would also be a good skill for future generations of students to have. I feel like integrating some kind of web development class into future secondary education would have tremendous benefits for the young people of tomorrow.