Final Reflection

In order to ensure that every member of the group contributed equal work and effort to the online exhibit, the group contracts were used. In theory, having each group sign the contract places an amount of seriousness and obligation to the project. However, it would be unrealistic to think that every student would be committed to working hard. For this reason only, the contracts are flawed. Regardless, the Plaza Midwood Neighborhood group attempted to follow through with their contract as closely as they were able. Problems with the group meeting regularly prevented the contract to be followed exactly. However, every goal set forth was reached and members of the group contributed to the final product.

The easiest component of the contract to follow closely was the mission statement. Our goal was to show the history of Plaza Midwood’s evolution and revitalization in a user-friendly way. We accomplished this without a doubt. Each component of our exhibit works to educate readers about the history of Plaza Midwood. Our strongest emphasis rests on the revitalization of Plaza Midwood due to the efforts of the Neighborhood Association in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the information already produced about Plaza Midwood focus on the neighborhood and residential areas. As a result, we focused our efforts on the business and civic aspects of Plaza Midwood. We did, of course, include information about events and the Neighborhood Association.

As you can tell by this description of our group’s mission, it is not exactly in line with the contract. The evolution was organic and ended up tying our project together seamlessly and, in some ways, effortlessly. Although we show diversity in the Plaza Midwood Neighborhood, revitalization in the 1980s is the more prominent component of our exhibit.

Unlike the ease with which our group could follow the mission statement, the division of labor was more difficult to manage. The difficulty our group faced with getting everyone to sit down and work on the project together made it difficult to allow one person to do the tasks set forth in the designated committees. For instance, there was a chair of item processing and research oversight, but everyone did these things equally. It turned out that every person became responsible for his or her own research, problem solving, metadata, and items. The chairs did not do any more work to ensure consistency throughout the website than anyone else.

By the closing weeks of our project, Sean, Susan, Jennifer, and I made great efforts to get together and edit all of the existing sections of our exhibit. We also made sure the existing metadata was consistent and as complete as possible. We attempted to track down last minute images to make our exhibit as complete as possible. However, we all did this work together and shared the responsibility of all of the committee designated duties.

Sticking to the outlined schedule was the most difficult for our group. Because one person created the schedule without an understanding of the priorities and obligations of the other group members, there were multiple conflicts. That being said, we accomplished all of the goals that were set forth. For instance, we each decided what areas of Plaza Midwood that we could research by mid-September. We had begun to upload items and metadata by the end of September. Due to the difficulty some members of the group had with tracking down important bits of information, we were unable to write the exhibit “stories” by October. However, our captions and metadata was being structured and organized throughout October.

As we began to construct our individual research stories, available members of the group edited the written work. By the end of November we were all doing editing and polishing, as projected in our schedule. There is always room for improvement, but with so many sets of eyes, we hope that we have caught the typos and inconsistencies of our exhibit.

This being said, I think it is important to note that it was very difficult to find old pictures of buildings. This was most clear when we were scrounging through the Carolina Room at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library looking for a photograph of Harris Market. Perhaps this is because one small grocery store wasn’t big news in 1936. Also, Plaza Midwood going through renovations in the 1980s may not have been big news to the city of Charlotte. Other transformations were occurring in Charlotte, so perhaps Plaza Midwood slipped through the cracks. This made research difficult.

Although our group faced difficulties with meeting and communicating with all four members, we managed to reach all of our desired goals and put together a well thought through and easy-to-navigate website. Our exhibits flow well from one topic to the next. Because our topics overlap, it is easy to follow the story of Plaza Midwood’s revitalization. We even added an additional simple page entitled: Chronology. Here, we compiled the dates from our research into an easy-to-understand chronology. We hope that this will make our site and the history even easier to follow and understand. This site is, after all, supposed to be an easy resource about the business and civic institutions in Plaza Midwood. We also included a map that points out all of the structures that are discussed in our exhibit.

Overall, most group members put forth equal time and effort into the exhibit. Our various strengths were pulled together into a very successful online exhibit. Some had great knowledge of the Plaza Midwood area, others new a lot about how to operate Omeka, and a few had a firm grasp on what an exhibit should say and look like for readers. With all of our talents pulled into one exhibit, our contractual obligations were upheld. We were true to our mission, everyone contributed to the effort to construct the website, and our exhibit goals were reached in the most timely fashion possible.

The Writer's Diet: Put to the Test!

I discovered something very interesting with this assignment: I'm a good writer, but only in the right context.

I tested my last blog post about Wed and Data Mining on the Writer's Diet and was very disappointed when they diagnosed my writing as FLABBY. Flabby? Hardly! And yet, the website had correctly counted my uses of "it," "this," "that," etc. So maybe the Writer's Diet has a point.

After looking over Yahoo's Style Guide, I could come up with reasons that made me feel less awful about my online writing skills. For starters, I know very specifically who my audience is. My audience are my classmates, my peers, my friends. So of course I'm writing my blogs in a very conversational way! On a related note, my "voice" on my blog is my own. My friendly, class voice as opposed to the "voice" I would use in a formal paper.

Hoping to reclaim my sense of having good writing skills, I decided to test the two introductory paragraphs of my thesis on the Writer's Diet. It was a first draft, sure, but I felt confident that my professional writing style would score me more points!

I was right! My thesis draft scored higher on the Writer's Diet. I am now FIT & TRIM! Yeah, I did a little fist pump like the Success Baby meme.

Writing skills can can always be improved upon, but I am proud to report that I am still a good writer when I'm putting my mind to it. The lesson I learned is that blogging to your friends and classmates is a recipe for poor writing! Let's be honest with one another, you don't speak or write to your friends with perfect grammar and polished word choice in mind, do you? No. And neither do I.

If I ever find myself in a situation where I am blogging and tweeting for a wider audience than my friends and peers, then I will kick my professional writing skills into gear. For now, I can make peace with being a flabby online writer.

For the record. This post scored me NEEDS TONING!

Web and Data Mining

This week's readings reminded me a lot about a discussion that our class had several weeks ago. In fact, I believe we were still in the conference room for this talk! We were discussing the massive amounts of information that we were putting out in internet space, what with Facebook statuses, tweets, blogs, every Google search, and every click of the mouse.

If you remember the conversation, we were talking about how one day historians could write a history about an average person's life based entirely on Facebook statuses, or perhaps write a history about an event using millions of tweets and statuses from people across the globe. We were saying in this discussion that there would be too much information out there, similar to how there is too little information for, say, a Dark Ages Historian looking at a particular poet.

Although all of these discussion alluded to this conversation from weeks ago, none made me more convinced to refresh our memories about this dialogue than William Turkel's Digital History Hacks.

The interesting thing about this article is that it never occurred to me that one could research how people input information into a search engine. When searching for the history of a specific country, for instance, most people type in "American History" as opposed to "the history of America." But, oddly enough, if the search is of a particular subject, such as technology, the same logic does not apply. People will usually type "the history of technology" instead of "technology history." (Note: I got these examples from Turkel's article. Clink the above link to see more of his examples.)

These types of calculations about who types what in search engines seems like it will quickly attract the attention of sociologists (especially those who focus on language!), if it hasn't already!

This article relates very closely to Dan Cohen's From Babel to Knowledge. In this article, Cohen talks about search engines that look for specific items using trusted sites. A great example, and one that Cohen developed, was searching for syllabi. He created a search engine that looks at only syllabi by inputting similar characteristics in the words of the document. In his syllabus search engine, you can type in the subject you want to teach and you will get examples of how similar classes arranged their syllabus.

Before I go on, let me just say: I didn't know such a thing was possible. It astounds me that with a little programming know-how, you can develop your own, useful search engine about anything you want. Another example Cohen uses is H-bot, which only looks at trusted sites when responding to a question/keyword.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find the Syllabus Finder when I did a quick Google search for it. I would have loved to try that out, although it wouldn't be as useful to me now as it would have been last Fall semester! If anyone else was able to locate this website, let me know!

Twitter in the Classroom

It took me a little while to find an article about Twitter's effect on education that I really enjoyed. The article I chose was a New York Times article about Twitter's use in classrooms, particularly high school, but the article says that Twitter could be useful starting in elementary school through university.

Take a look at Trip Gabriel's Speaking Up in Class, Silently, Using Social Media.

Perhaps Gabriel is making a good point that telling students to put their phones away and not use their laptops is futile. People of all ages today are texting and tweeting and posting even when they're in a room full of their closest friends. So asking a student to stop may be counterproductive. Embracing this technology and putting it to use in the classroom, Gabriel argues, is helping students open up to class discussions and ask questions they might not feel comfortable voicing aloud.

My one concern as I read about Tweeting during class was: how can you be sure that people are staying on task and not doing other things as well?

It turns out that Gabriel also had this thought. He explains that Tweeting in class is only successful if teachers check the conversation after class to catch for non-class-related Tweets. Although, I would still argue that if students are tweeting on their phones, what's to stop them from texting their friends at the same time? Teachers would have no way to moderate those conversations.

Students from an English high school class who tweet for and during class were interviewed for the article. They all agreed that Tweeting allows quiet students to get involved in the discussion and interests the students enough that they are more willing to ask questions and contribute to the conversation. 

Although embracing technology is a necessity these days, I'd still argue that we should tread carefully. Not every classroom will benefit from Tweeter as a way to generate conversation. For instance, our LBST courses of 110 students may overwhelm the professor and each other with questions and comments. Not to mention it would be more difficult to catch the inappropriate comments.

On the other hand, we all experienced a successful usage of Twitter in our History in the Digital Age class when Jennifer couldn't come in, but could contribute ideas and thoughts via Twitter. So perhaps with smaller classes, Twitter can become an excellent tool for teachers and professors.

To those of you who want to become a teacher or professor, would you use Twitter as a discussion tool in your classrooms? Why or why not?

Some Articles and Some Thoughts

The two articles I read were very different from one another, so I will talk about them separately.

First, I read The Historical Profession and Archival Education. This article makes the point that archival students can take two educational paths: history or library science. Since the internet boom, library science has become the most popular route to take for archival students due to its technology focus. History, as I think we all know from being in the history department at UNCC, is in many ways still focusing on traditional research and book/article publishing.

What made this article interesting to me was that it reminded me of how museums are also changing. Anymore, if you want to become a museum professional (like me!), you really must embrace technology and incorporating it into your education, the museum, and outreach. Although I am a self-declared luddite, I still embrace the courses that UNCC have offered that would make me a better candidate for museums today. I took a video editing course, and in this course I am learned about twitter, blogging, and online exhibits.

But back to the article, I believe the author, Joseph M. Turrini, makes a good point when he says that "History departments should continue to be part of archival education." Although they must also adapt to the changing market and techniques in order to give their students the best chance at getting a job, I also believe that history offers special insight to archiving. In many case, archiving deals with very old documents, papers, journals. History will help an archivist take their skills to the next level by interpretation and explanation.

Second, I read Enhancing Internet Use for History by Categorizing Online Resources. More brief and less thought provoking than my first choice, I felt that this was a great resource. The author, Edward A. Riedinger, suggests multiple databases for historians. Among them are JSTOR and Project MUSE, both of which I have used and enjoyed using. There are also many various other sites that I have not heard of and links to them. Go check it out!

Riedinger's emphasis is on organization and categorization throughout the article. I can personally comment on the level of difficulty a person can have on creating a list of keywords to attach to a particular object so that researchers looking for the material can find it with ease. As an intern at the Earl Scruggs Center, I was introduced to the Past Perfect cataloging system. Part of making a complete entry for an item in a collection is by creating a list of searchable terms and descriptions. Not only would you include what the item is, but what it looks like, what it represents, who or what it is associated with, and more. This is where research comes into play. In addition, one must think about what type of person or research would want this particular item and what words would they be using in a keyword search.

I agree that "applying techniques of keyword and subject searching" is a vital component in navigating online databases. Historians need to be broad, but still specific enough, with their keyword searches to find what they are looking for. At the same time, those people inputting searchable terms to connect with an item or written document, must think like a researcher. The terms must be broad enough to encompass a lot of terms but narrow enough so that researchers can find what they want easily. It is a very challenging task.

Wikipedia: Sometimes Misused

As I was watching the video Wikipedia Debate, I couldn't stop thinking about one ID test question from Dr. Smith's LBST course last semester. I think this real life example shows how Wikipedia is misused by students who are unwilling to take additional steps to get accurate information from more reliable sources. While I agree with the video that Wikipedia is a good place to start when researching, it should never be your only source of information.

Dr. Smith's LBST course looked at Slavery, Citizenship, and Manhood up to the Civil War. His tests were ID tests, where students are given a list of terms to choose to answer. On one such test, one of the terms was "Loyal Slave States." I read several answers to this ID. I was stunned by how many students said (roughly) the following: "There were eight loyal slave states. Four of them became loyal slave states after the battle of Fort Sumter."

After reading about ten incorrect answers (like above) to this ID, all making the exact same claim, I decided to check the internet to see where these students were getting this answer. 'Cause Dr. Smith certainly never said that!

I found myself at Wikipedia. The term "Loyal Slave States" has since been taken down (which, on a different note, shows how quickly this site can be changed and updated!). This is the entry that I found instead: Boarder States. Yet, if you read the first paragraph, you can still see where some of these students got their wrong answer. The original entry had faulty punctuation. And that's putting it lightly. This entry is more clear than the entry that lead these students to an incorrect answer.

My point with posting about this experience is to show how unreliable Wikipedia can be. It also illustrates how often undergraduate students go to Wikipedia and treat it as a credible source.

This is not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have value. It is a very valuable resource. As the "Wikipedia Debate" video points out, it's breadth of terms makes it a perfect starting point for nearly any research topic.

The lesson to take away from this is: check your sources and don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Creating a Group Contract: Plaza-Midwood Neighborhood Group

Before working with my three group members (Jennifer, Susan, and Sean), I felt a little apprehensive about how the project would come together. What I mean is, who would make sure I was scanning and uploading my exhibit pieces correctly? How were we all going to coordinate our written descriptions of our exhibit pieces to create a coherent story?

These two questions were answered once our group worked on creating a contract. We split the four components amongst our group members to ease the burden of meeting together. Susan created "chairs" for each of us, which emphasized our individual strengths. This answered the questions that I mentioned form above.

It turns out that I- with my experience in exhibits- will help pull the exhibits together to create a coherent story. And Susan- who has scanned many images her GA position in the library last year- will help scanning and uploading the images for consistency. Jennifer is our top-dog in a way, she will be holding the group together to make sure that everyone finds the sources and information that they need for the exhibit. Last (but certainly not least) is Sean, who has a lot of experience in computers, marketing, and site-building, will help us create our website, check our links, and make navigation as simple as possible.

All of the things that I was apprehensive about seemed to have been cleared up by the simple task of creating a contract. We four make a great team. And I'm excited to work with them. It'll be work, but my teammates will make it fun and easy.

I look forward to hearing about the strategies, tasks, fears, and excitements of my classmates.

Until then- GO TEAM PLAZA-MIDWOOD!!