Hope Greenberg

A new year, a new re-purposed blog space

2010-01-15T07:38:00.000-08:00

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive,
others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated
discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you
exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun
long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified
to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for
a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the
argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer
him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against
you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent,
depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the
discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart.
And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

2005-04-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

HST296a HST296e: Vermont Letters

2005-03-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

I've created a new collection on our dSpace server in the "Collections for Testing" area titled "Vermont Letters. (http://badger.uvm.edu/dspace/handle/2051/3969)
The collection contains images and may contain transcriptions of letters to and from Vermonters in the antebellum period (1849-1860). The letters are drawn from the Savage, Hubbard, and Vilas family archives at UVM Library's Special Collections. (More info about these collections available in the Finding Aids at: http://bailey.uvm.edu:6336/dynaweb/findingaids

I'm looking for reflections of print culture in rural women's writing as well as evidence of cultural themes and beliefs.

HST296e: women, voices, blogs, paper topic

2005-02-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

In the article
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Indiana
the authors suggest that:
"In keeping with the Androcentric Rule, male authors historically have been more highly valued than female authors (Spender, 1989). Moreover, personal journal-writing, traditionally associated with women, is generally not considered “serious” writing (Culley, 1985; McNeill, 2003)."

The question of gender ownership of serious writing was being hammered out in the 1850s. Can VT letters, journals, publications of that time provide any indications about the perceptions about women's writing in these venues. How did people value this writing, what assumptions were made about it, what were women saying in writing? An amorphous question but could be refined into something...

(A larger excerpt is available in the humanitiescomputing blog.

HST296A and HST296E

2005-01-24T13:07:00.000-08:00

Set up class web pages for 296 A & E as follows:

HST 296A: Community in Early America
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/personal/portfolio/296a-index.html

HST 296E: Rural Life in the United States
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/personal/portfolio/296e-index.html

2005: Plans

2005-01-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

Plans for 2005 include:

1. "Support for UVM Digital Collection Projects"

Planning

UVMDC will continue to explore digital collection applications. This year the focus will also be on how to grow and support initiatives.
UVM has received an earmark funds commitment for digital collections. While this will focus on digitizing the Leahy papers, the UVMDC committee will be involved. The extent of that involvement will be discussed at a February meeting. This could be a major time commitment.

Planning new collections: Example: Center for Research on Vermont is interested in putting several hundred abstracts of their Vermont-related theses and dissertations online. Their timeframe is to start this later in the semester, so we are still in the organizational stages.

Development/Deployment

HST 11-12: The original project involved two activities, a) developing a web site for the multiple sections of the course, and b) developing an image database for use by the faculty. The first activity is being done by the TechCats. The second was begun under the auspices of a Instructional Incentive Grant which covered the scanning of several hundred images. Mounting those images and adding to them will continue as a joint project between AC (me), and the History faculty involved and will take the form, this semester, of an internship program. Two students have been identified and we are working out their schedules and assignments. I will be responsible for teaching them the technical aspects, as well as developing ideas and working with the faculty on how to integrate the image collection with their teaching.

Other digital collection projects include Geology (Wes is primary contact), and a revival/completion of the Eugenics Project.

Dynaweb! We (CIT and Special Collections, both) need a replacement. This involves both finding an appropriate application, installing and testing it (where?) and refitting the existing collections. The replacement will obviously be XML-based. Our documents are SGML. While XML is SGML, the reverse is not completely true, so the documents will need some work. A little programming help or some student help would work wonders here.

2. Support for Humanities Computing

UT&D/CTL small workshops. First up this semester is one on creating documents with Adobe Acrobat.
ICT literacy course for history students - Have begun discussions with History Dept. faculty for a 1-2 credit methods course with primary focus on related IT literacy. If it works it could be used as a model for other humanities disciplines. Proposed time would be Spr '06.
Humanities Computing Literacy Course - CS005: Introduction to Applied Humanities Computing, first taught Spr '04. Next session is scheduled for Fall '05. Based on experience gained last year, I will be rewriting a substantial portion of this 3 credit course this summer.

3. Infrastructure Support and Development

Digital Library Collections applications: dSpace, ContentDM, Fedora, dlxs, possibly Luminis and Documentum.

Text Encoding Intitative (TEI) upgrade: v. P5 has been extensively re-worked as an XML-based DTD and schema. The TEI is the primary mark-up used by our current (and probably future) digital text collections.

Developing "best practices" for humanities computing and digital library projects.

January break summary

2005-01-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

HST1112 collection is under way at http://www.uvm.edu/dspace. After an initial tussle with various groups and permissions it's ready to go. Two copies of each image will be loaded: an archival tiff and a smaller jpeg for use in PP, etc.

Met with Dona and Shirley to clarify plan for hst1112 student interns and a schedule for this semester.

I'll add a few more images to the hst1112 collection on ContentDM as a comparison tool.

Also on dSpace this month: Geology. Wes and I met with Char and Gabriella to discuss the future of the Geology slide collection. We decided to move away from the previous incarnation of the image_db Wes script and into dSpace.

Next up: this semester's projects: see next entry.

HST287 final paper

2004-12-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

final paper paper is up on site
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/personal/portfolio/287-index.html
It ended up being more like an introduction to the paper I thought I was going to write. That is, it was rather too chronological and overview-like. It could become a good starting place for a couple things: 1) a survey/study of current history academics and what they are doing (and think they are doing re: the web and historical production/teaching) and/or 2) an exploration of what I think they are doing, and or 3) a look at how 1 and 2 tie into post-structuralism, and history/memory studies.

But that's for another time...

UVM Libraries: literature and technology subject heading

2004-11-29T07:45:00.000-08:00

UVM Libraries Titles

Mediawork: Writing Machines

2004-11-29T07:40:00.000-08:00

Mediawork: Writing Machines

O'Reilly book: Real World Web Services

2004-11-18T08:48:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting O'Reilly book:

Real World Web Services
Will Iverson
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-00642-X, 222 pages, $29.95 US, $43.95 CA
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/realwws/

"The core idea behind "Real World Web Services" is simple: after years of
hype, what are the major players really doing with web services? Standard
bodies may wrangle and platform vendors may preach, but at the end of the
day what are the technologies that are actually in use, and how can
developers incorporate them into their own applications? Those are the
answers this book delivers."

"The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating the use and
integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, FedEx, and many more web
services. Some of these vendors have been extremely successful with their
web service deployments. For example, eBay processes over a billion web
service requests a month."

"Iverson focuses on building 8 fully worked-out example web applications
that incorporate the best web services available today. The book
thoroughly documents how to add functionality like automating listings for
auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending
faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data from multiple
news and web service feeds into a single format or monitoring the latest
weblog discussions and Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of
topics of interest by integrating APIs from popular web sites."

"Real World Web Services" doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to
the correctness of web services on a theological level. Instead, it
focuses on the practical, real world usage of web services as the latest
evolution in distributed computing, allowing for structured communication
via internet protocols. As you'll see, this includes everything from
sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of
SOAP and various vendor SDKs."

ewalk stepbystep movie

2004-11-17T13:36:00.000-08:00

So sometimes you just have to have fun:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/movies/stepbystep/

::: List of Collections with Descriptions :::

2004-11-12T12:07:00.000-08:00

::: List of Collections with Descriptions :::
The digital collections at the U of Washington Libraries include several hundred carte de visite of American mid-19th actors as well as fashion plates from the entire century.

The entrance page is also a good model for how we might want to approach a similar page from UVMDC.

EndNote

2004-11-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

Here's what I did on the CTL laptops:
- installed Endnote 8 on all Dells that would boot.
- installed the 8.0.1 update on all that had SP2 (about a third of them, which means we have some general updating to do)
- copied the UVM Library Endnote connection file (U of Vermont.enz) into the Connections folder in each Endnote install

BTW, thanks to Malachi we learn that the U of Vermont.enz file provided by the library (http://library.uvm.edu/guides/tips/endnote.html) will work on a Mac as long as you delete the .enz extension.

Want to try EndNote? Software available at http://www.uvm.edu/software, guides/tips at www.endnote.com in Support/Services area.

Also, there's a link there to many resources for EndNote created by other libraries.

Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs

2004-11-10T06:14:00.000-08:00

Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs: 100 year old Color Photographs

According to the site:
"Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters."

These beautiful images have a strange effect: we are so used to seeing old B&W photos that we envision the world they depict in those sepia or grey tones. To see the same age in vibrant color makes it, in some ways, less realistic--my reaction is that this must be a modern reproduction/reenactment. But then when you really look at the images and look for the details--amazing. Even the digital reproductions found at this site are wonderful.

HST287: historical production and push

2004-10-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that, even on the web, people stay in their circles. Despite "literature searches" we tend to follow the same sources, the same groups around. Will push technologies change that? Will academic push information break through those circles? Something to think about for The Paper.

A Companion to Digital Humanities - Book Information

2004-10-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

Coming in November. Looks to be quite useful. Have sent in request to library to order it.
A Companion to Digital Humanities - Book Information

Innovate - October/November 2004

2004-10-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

A new journal that features research and practice in IT in education. Looks like it's a blog, too. Innovate - October/November 2004

WordPress

2004-10-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

Liz Lawley's scripts:
Again, the page on her site that details how to get this up and running is here: http://mamamusings.net/archives/2004/01/06/mt_courseware_stepbystep.php

HST287: paper ideas, musings

2004-09-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

Some current trends that may intersect in interesting ways in how we "do" history:
- "information explosion" - a perception (and an increasing reality?) that the amount of collected data is too overwhelming to process by traditional means
- instant information - that the web has or will have "everything"
- instant communication - person-to-person or person to fluid groups (subcategory: polarization)
- the tyranny of "I" - everything revolves around the individual (and "I feel")
- the impact of video (especially post-70s quick cutting TV) on human brain development (cf. recent studies on connection between under age 2 TV viewing and ADHD)
- the refinement of marketing techniques, esp. its role in politics and now a new collaboration between marketing agencies, Proctor & Gamble, etc.
- the changing role, nature, and process of education (esp. "the disciplines", the rise of part-timers, and of course, online learning)

HST287: AHC-UK/RHS 2004 Conference Main Page

2004-09-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

'Recasting the Past: Digital Histories'

The aim of the conference is to explore how the ever increasing number and variety of digital and electronic sources have changed the way in which history, and historical sources, are created, selected, researched, taught, written, presented and used. Even historians who do not use computer methodologies are likely to encounter sources in digital form or have their access to analogue sources mediated electronically. Whilst the digital form can transcend the constraints of time and space it brings new problems and challenges to historians and historical research.

AHC-UK/RHS 2004 Conference Main Page

Flogged by the Blogs: Blankley, Rather

2004-09-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

Flogged by the blogs
By Tony Blankley
Sunday, September 19, 2004
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/guests/ s_252066.html

Once said British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." That observation came to mind as I watched Dan Rather struggle violently like a proud old marlin caught on a hook by the young Internet fishermen.

Twisting and turning, the great fish only drives the hook in deeper. Plunging and rising, it only exhausts itself -- while the exuberant fishermen carefully manage the line and grab for the powerful hand hook with which they will end the great fish's sea-life.

I like a good fish dinner, but I've never cared much for fishing, as I hate to see a noble creature in its death agony. Yet that is what we are observing. It is Dan Rather and CBS News, through their failed effort to prove the legitimacy of their forged Bush National Guard documents, who are being revealed as hapless, helpless victims of an anarchic, swarming, overwhelming Internet blog technology. Soon, other great news institutions inevitably will be revealed for their inadequate capacity to fully report the news.

As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We're now getting a glimpse of the Internet bloggers' strength.

For three quarters of a century, when CBS News entered a fight it had been an unfair mismatch for its adversary. The credibility, research capacity and gate-keeping monopoly of the network would overwhelm its victim. It was breathtaking to see, moment by moment, the bloggers' advantage.

CBS did what it has always done -- produced and broadcasted a highly polished segment in which the argument was magisterially framed to their advantage, with the facts favorable to It cherry-picked for presentation. Annoying contrary facts were ignored. Carefully edited, prime-time quality interviews of their supposedly authoritative expert witnesses were laid in. The whole package was opened, narrated and concluded with dignified contempt for their victim by their star asset, uber-anchor Dan Rather.

Then the bloggers went to work. From the four corners of humanity, experts started deconstructing the "truth" that CBS had presented. Who knew that there are experts who specialize just in the history of IBM Selectric typing balls or the kerning capacity of computer printing?

As each of these experts added their information to one blog, other bloggers would monitor it, pass it on, add a new fact, reorganize the analysis and synthesize new information. If new information proved wrong, it was corrected by yet another expert in the blogosphere. Mistakes were cheerfully admitted and instantly corrected. People who had filled out such forms 30 years ago added their analysis.

Both technical and historic information constantly came in -- ever-increasing the fullness of understanding on the topic. It was like watching time-lapse photography of a cell dividing and growing. It was as if the very mechanism for establishing truth was a living, pulsating force.

CBS had one handwriting expert against the bloggers' legions of subspecialists. It was pathetic. The bloggers' advantage is that the experts find the bloggers. There are just millions of smart people all over the world sitting at their computers, ready to join the quest. The bloggers themselves often add powerful analytical capacity to the process. They picked CBS's story as clean as a school of piranhas would pick clean some poor water buffalo that wandered into their river.

Bloggers have had this capacity for a few years. We had a taste of it in the Trent Lott affair. But what has made the bloggers a strategic component of national politics is that their readership now includes many senior reporters, editors and producers in the old media. There are enough self-respecting old media journalists who simply cannot see the cornucopia of valid information on the Internet and then ignore it in their reporting.

Instead of the bloggers only reaching the few million of their readers, they are reaching the larger mass public through the old media. The old media is becoming complicit in its own demise, just as some French aristocrats supported the revolution against their own ancient regime.

Count me a supporter of the revolution. But revolutions are messy affairs where much of value is lost as well as gained.

Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times.

HST287: O'Donnell's review of Lanham

2004-09-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Review of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word by James O'Donnell

HST287: A Review of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word

2004-09-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

A Review of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word

HST287: Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair

2004-09-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair

eWalks

2004-09-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Our utility for tracking steps for the 2004 Step by Step wellness program

http://www.uvm.edu/~dsv/surveys/stepbystep/stepbystep.htm

hst11-12

2004-09-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

We (Dona Brown, Jackie Carr, Holly Parker, Chris Ruscio, and me) met on 9/16/04 to plan the future of the HST11-12 project. Our current plan is to:

1) Put the existing images in the ContentDM database in the next two weeks (Hope)
- determine appropriate metadata: which fields, what standards
2) Get additional images from a CD of Jackie's (Chris?)
3) Holly and Chris will recommend a URECA student to Dona who will meet with the student and write up a proposal. (Probably Malachi)
4) We will plan to do a demo for the History dept at an upcoming departmental meeting to show the collection, discuss ways it might be used in class, and offer support for how to do so.
5) We will meet with Jackie in a classroom where HST11 is expected to be taught to take a look at using the equipment, using the collection in the room, etc.

UVM medieval studies web site

2004-09-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

met with Kaitlin Connoll who will be working on a UVM Medieval Studies web site with Laurel Broughton. We just did the basics, to be continued.

HST287: portfolio web site up

2004-09-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/personal/portfolio/287-index.html

ILL, Burke, History and Theory

2004-09-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

ILL'd:
RequestType: Book
Author: Burke, Peter
Title: History and Social Theory
Place Of Publication: Ithaca
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication Date: 1993
OCLC Number: OCLC: 28926266

EndNote Workshop for CTL

2004-08-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

Introducing EndNote

EndNote is a software tool for creating and organizing your bibliographies. You can enter your own references, then sort them, search them, and have EndNote automatically format them in a variety of journal styles. You can connect directly to Voyager or other online databases where you can search for references, then have EndNote automatically capture them to store in your bibliographies. You can use EndNote in MicroSoft Word to build and format citations, figures, and tables. In this workshop we will explore how to get and install EndNote--it's free this year from the UVM software archive. We'll create our first bibliographies, and connect to online databases to add references to our bibliographies. We will also discuss how your students might use EndNote.

90 minutes

Draft PhotoShop Elements Workshop Description

2004-08-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

Photoshop Elements: The Basics

Adobe PhotoShop Elements is an easy to use, inexpensive, “lite” version of PhotoShop, the program for creating and editing images. In this class you will

• Learn how to work with images, including scanning tips and tricks
• Get familiar with basic tools and features
• Alter, enhance, resize, crop and transform your images
• Work with print images and web images (and understand their differences)
• Experiment with Element's filters

Prerequisites: basic PC skills in a Windows or Macintosh environment

2 hours

2004/2005 Plans

2004-08-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

Projects and activities:

1) Migrating from DynaWeb
DynaWeb has been causing problems on chipmunk. Migrating to another product would be a good idea. This requires 2 projects:

a) finding, installing, testing another product. Must be free, easy, robust. ha. Which platform? Could I reconfigure my old Dell to be a sandbox (linux?) Could this actually be done in one semester?
b) the dyna suite is a pre-xml, sgml environment. Several changes need to be made in the (hundreds of) sgml files currently in use to make them completely xml compatible. (While all xml=sgml, not all sgml=xml.)

2) ContentDM, HST11-12
I will be speaking to Chris about the HST11-12 images project. I'd like to take that portion of the HST11-12 work back so that I can load the images (have some content to experiment with in ContentDM). The images need some reformatting and lots of metadata work.

3) UVMDC
In our quest for a product we abandoned our efforts to write general guidelines/best practices for projects. Time to pick this up again.

4) Publish Web Pages at UVM
The tutorial for basic publishing (with TechCat Kelly). Should now approach publishing on several levels: basic Composer/FTP, WebCT, WebGuide, Blogs (I am obviously NOT suggesting we write the complete WebCT or WebGuide pieces)

5) Workshops:
EndNote for CTL
PhotoShop Elements for UT&D
Adobe Acrobat and PDF for UT&D

6) Dr Is In, WebCT, TabletPCs, blogging
Ongoing faculty support in the above areas.

7) Continue the Master's program

8) Revamp CS005 for next semester. Plan activities around a once a week evening class instead of three times a week. Change some components, add/remove others. Broaden coverage of XML. Begin final project earlier, etc.

9) Plan for spring collaboration with Dona Brown on a Vermont Studies Program course project to digitize a related UVM holding. Based on student project from CS005. (Students scan, transcribe, markup and publish VT-related historical documents.)

10) Whither dSpace? Whither ETDs?
Would there be interest now in electronic thesis and dissertations on the part of the Grad College? Would writing an EndNote/Word template help this along? PDF files stored in dSpace for delivery?

11) Classics letters, Chaucer Duchess
Check on status of Jacque Bailey's letters project. Assist as needed. Ditto Laurel Broughten's Chaucer "Book of the Duchess"

12) TEI
Join consortium. Explore the new TEI P5.

13) Begin Alice recovery...