Alarming. I never thought of digital media as fragile. I digitized my 35mm slides a few years ago and find that my disks may go unstable any day now…yikes! The digital pictures I’m snapping away may not be around for my grandkids? A quick google search for “archival quality CDs” turns up a group of angry folks, and no material answers, yet.
Here’s a link to an interesting write up: “myth of the 100 year CD” http://www.rense.com/general52/themythofthe100year.htm
I think there’s a technical solution out there in our near future, somebody will offer archival quality materials. But until then, “multiple backups are the rule!!”
Thanks to Mills for a objective look at utility of hypermedia (actually hypertext) in education. THANKS SO MUCH for focusing on the right question: getting beyond the 1’s and 0’s, what are the students getting out of all this? I can see the danger of not carefully considering this question first as we rush to build our links and APIs.
Some big howevers on the findings: So much of the student use seems dependant on how he built the web site (connectivity, availability of primary sources, etc), it only suggests how things might go.
He didn’t seem to address the activity of the history students…didn’t they react opposite to the rest of the student body? How should we understand that?
Bravo to Pace for thinking about the nature and craft of teaching…why assume a good writer/researcher knows how to teach?
The potential of geo-mashups to help create history looks promising. The visualization of geo and spatial information looks helpful and a nice addition to historical work. But is it central to serious history?
For the historian there appear to be big startup costs. A good amount of time spent spidering around footnotes only turned up unfamiliar interfaces, puzzling data lists, dull meeting minutes, and an occasional interesting chart. Diverse databases, unfamiliar programs, unique viewing and manipulation software, and new and emerging communities of interest appear to be daunting obstacles for a “nice-to-have” element of a historical work.
Until the entry costs get lower, this line of effort appears to be primarily for a dedicated track of map experts and intrepid experimenters with a lot of time for what’s window dressing….and how much time can a serious historian devote to this peripheral element? .
After our class on searching, I was fired up to try some new search ideas. Over the period of 3 or 4 days, I tried a lot of different searches to support a class I’m teaching.
Boolean logic available through search sites like Google is extremely helpful in narrowing millions of hits down to manageable numbers. Parenthesis, OR, and ~ are useful functions to help focus searches.
I teach a course at the National War College I call “On Combat: Human Behavior in Battle.” I’m leading seminars this month on Killing and Atrocities. I decided to look on the web for personal anecdotes or reflections of those responsible for civilian casualties. Trial and error helped me narrow multiple search attempts. I kept changing combinations of terms, adding and subtracting as I went. Here’s a rough approximation of my safari:
§ (“collateral damage” OR “civilian casualties”) AND ( ~ feelings) returned 1,200,000 hits–none useful I found out I didn’t need the AND, because Google assumes an AND. § “civilian casualties” ( ~ feelings OR “reaction to”) was a tad batter, but still unmanageable at 585,000 § “we were responsible” “dead civilian” got a few hits, but none useful § “I was responsible” “collateral damage” conscience was not too bad either. I then tried war diary and “war diary” which really started to pay off. “War diary” and any of the above broad combinations was useful, especially “war diary: and “i killed”. These led me to a lot of sites featuring personal war narratives; I decided to keep a few of the outstanding personal accounts. A serendipidous find was an amazing diary of an Iraqi officer under air attack in 1991. It can be found at: http://library.thinkquest.org/18220/gulfwar/diary.html
BTW: Excerpts from “Machete Season” (the Rwanda Killers Speak) are particularly distressing if you want to see the depths of what people are capable of.
On February 23rd, 1991 I played a part in a desperate battle in central
Iraq. Eight American Special Forces soldiers had been discovered and surrounded deep behind friendly lines. Flights of F-16 fighters helped the Americans stay alive until nightfall, when a helicopter was able to pull them out. The audio file linked here: Air Combat Audio is the audio from my cockpit videotape recorder. The recording is confusing because of all the things going on at once. Here’s a thumbnail sketch:
Radio call signs:
- Pug1: me
- Pug 2 or just “two”: Joey B., my Wingman
- Pug 3: or just “Three”: Evan T. leader of my second two-ship formation
- Pug 4: or just “Four”: Pete M, Evan’s wingman.
- Pointer: another flight of F-16s (overhead our flight). Pointer will take over when my flight has to leave for low fuel/ammo
- Guard: The special forces guys on the ground.
Radio Terms:
- Bingo: Low fuel state–time to head back
- Winchester: No more bombs–out of ammo
Through this recording, I am talking to Pointer (the other F-16s), trying to describe where Guard (the Special Forces) are. At the same time, I’m talking to guard and walking our bombs in closer and closer to him. I’m also talking to my flight, managing their bomb runs and positions. Towards the end of the recording, Guard excitedly yells “no more hits!” this was our final pass where we put bombs within 50 yards of the good guys and broke the back of a company-sized attack. For further reading on this battle, check this article: http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1992/articles/jan_92/jan2a_92.html
How I got the audio clip: This clip took an interesting path. It started as a ¾” videotape from my heads-up display. In 1992 I transferred it to a ½” standard VCR tape. In 2005, I transferred it to a DVD. In 2006, I used a sound recording program to strip it from the DVD and save as a .wmv file.
File is at: http://www.oncombat.org/Clio%20Wired/Close%20Air%20Support%20Battle%2023%20Feb%201991.mp3
Please follow this link to a short video on “programming our kids to kill“.
It’s based on Army historian SLA Marshall’s observation that American riflemen were reluctant to fire on the enemy without moral pressure from leaders and peers. Today Lt Col Dave Grossman argues natural barriers to killing are being eroded by the realistic “first person shooter” videogames so common today.
Making the Video: I used some high-end equipment from our AV folks at work to pull the movie footage from a DVD for the first minute. The next two segments were pulled from Google Videos. A lot of people take movies of their video game play, so this segment was easy to find. The challenge was to convert google video downloads to something useful like .wmv or .avi files. I found a great application that you can install as a bookmarklet, and while you’re playing the google video, you click on the bookmark and it prompts you to download the video as an avi file. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/04/download-google-videos-as-avi-files.html
This was a great start, but one obstacle: the avi file had a codec Moviemaker couldn’t recognize….so this led me on a search for a codec. I found a workable solution through Divx codecs, which put me on track to editing these clips. The 4th clip was forwarded to me from a friend in special forces. The clip has made the rounds and can be found on youtube or google, but I was glad to have the original file so I didn’t have to do any more conversions.
The divergent readings for October 3rd were a little difficult to put together in my head, which perhaps, is the desired learning point of remixing this week.
Hooray for finding new ways to recombine information. Isn’t that exactly what historians do? Historians search for long lost and widely scattered data, arrange it, combine it with different sources, and then “remix” it into a more meaningful synthesis? With web 2.0 and beyond, the professional challenge will become a question of professional and personal achievement. If the promise of interoperability and web 2.0 make the searching and remixing easy, how do we prevent a devaluation of the coin of the realm? If we build an effective toolbox of search and remix functions, the “work” of history will shift from a balance of search and synthesis to interpretation at the back end. Will this be good enough for the profession. It will take some time….maybe as long as it takes to get the web 2.0 or 3.0 tools up and running.
Bill
