Marie Curie on Ada Lovelace Day

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Today is Ada Lovelace Day,  an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. From their website, ‘Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.” I think the day is a great idea, and it [...]

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Sitemaps and Wireframes: Playing History

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Tonight in my Creating History with New Media class were workshoping our sitemaps and wireframes. I worked these up a few weeks ago, before we started building the live site, so some of this has already changed, but it is still worth sharing as part of the process.

See the wireframe shots below.

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Omeka Not Just For Exhibits: Using Omeka To Build A Colaborative Directory

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

While Omeka is billed as a CMS for exhibiting cultural heritage projects it’s also a awesome platform for publishing collections of all sorts of stuff with rich metadata. Jim and I have been cracking away on our Playing History project and I thought I would share some of our experience working with and modifying Omeka [...]

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Strategy and Scope: Readings In Digital Humanities Project Management

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

One of the first steps in constructing a digital humanities project is to define your strategy and project scope. This week in our creating history and new media class we had a great discussion about a topic most of the class had not really considered, what I would call project management in the digital humanities. [...]

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Recap from first Triannual Zotero Trainers Workshop

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Last week I had the pleasure of running the first in Zotero’s triannual (that’s three times a year) workshops for Zotero trainers (looking for a better name for “trainer”). I had a great time, and I think everyone left with a nice balance of practical next-steps for making Zotero work at their own institutions and [...]

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A Few More Site Ideas For Playing History: This Time From Mega Man

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

One more round of site theme ideas. I think I might really like this round. Do folks like these more or less then the last batch? I did not fill in all the content for these, just a few boxes and headings to give a sense of the concept. Each of them would take a [...]

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Working With Colors And Style For playinghistory.org

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

I realize I am getting a bit ahead of myself but I get excited about playing with the visual style of the project. Which do you think are the best? Or should I just scrap it and do something completely different?

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Darwin, History, and Visualizations

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Two weeks ago our Creating History in New Media class had a great chance to chat with historian David Staley about his book Computers Visualization and History and Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics. New media provides some exciting places to take conversations about visualizations in history, but one of my other take-a-ways from the conversation [...]

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Science Grows On Trees: The History of Science and Technology Acording to Video Games

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

I think historians and sociologists of science might be surprised to learn that video game designers spend a considerable amount of time and energy building playable models of the history of science and technology. In game design circles these systems are commonly referred to as “Technology Trees“. Below is an example of one of these [...]

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Visualization and History: Hint, It’s Not About Pictures

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

If your into history and computers, and looking for a mildly trippy read, break open a bottle of wine and spend three of four hours reading through David Staley’s Computers Visualization and History. Staley’s central, somewhat provocative, contention is that there is nothing natural or automatic about historians choice to communicate through writing. Like some [...]

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