Epistemographer

‘Cause I never got around to posting this here before:

Doing Digital History: An Introduction for Historians of Science, Technology and Industry
June 6-10, 2005

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University invites scholars whose work speaks to the history of science, technology and industry to submit applications for a workshop on the theory and practice of digital history, to be held June 6-10, 2005. Specific topics to be covered include genres of online history, designing a website, creating a site infrastructure, digitizing documents, identifying and building audiences for online history, and issues of copyright and preservation. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of both the technical and methodological issues raised by the practice of digital history, as well as the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history.

Co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the National History Center, the workshop will be held at George Mason University’s Arlington campus, conveniently located in metropolitan Washington, DC. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, there will be no registration fee, and a limited number of scholarships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars. 

As spaces and funding are limited, please submit an application form by March 1, 2005 (available at http://echo.gmu.edu/resources/workshops.php).

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on and off with others at the Center on a grant application to the IMLS. We’re proposing to build a package of interfaces and extensions to Firefox that will in essence stick our Scrapbook and Scribe programs into the browser itself (where more and more research is done).

With that in mind, this post by Dorothea at Caveat Lector resonated. She writes:

“For the longest time (and to this day in some places), librarians created knowledge structures for other librarians. Today we’re getting downright resentful at the thought of putting others’ needs first, opening up our toyboxes…We need to turn some real usability experts loose on our stuff. Because our stuff…is really pretty bad…We’re thinking in terms of the data, not in terms of the user.”

This echoes a lot of the conversations I’ve been hearing among librarians (at times, I feel like “eavesdropping” is a more appropriate word for what I’ve been doing w/r/t the library world); there’s a crisis of purpose in that world, in a world where libraries have to compete with Google, Wikipedia, and other massively accessible information resources, users aren’t immediately going to libraries as their first choice for information.

At question, though, are the means that will enable those users to use that information (what Raymond Yee calls “Gather, Create, Share“ tools). The natural thing for librarians to do is to start building such tools, but many have been finding that they’re not quite sure exactly what scholars and researchers want (to be fair, those users have been remarkably bad at actually communicating what they want and need), and one of the big discussions in the world of digital library tool-building seems to be whether to build tools themselves, or make resources available and leave the tool-building to users. That’s our argument at CHNM – since we’re users ourselves, we know better than librarians what historians need/want from information tools. Of course, as anyone who knows me will testify, I’m not exactly a normal historian, which raises the difficult question of whether we’re building tools for historians, or just tools for early-adopter, gearhead database-designing historian/programmers…