First of all, I’ll reveal that I’m on the Outreach Committee.  So I can really only speak to the issues that the four of us faced.  Hopefully other committee participants will chime in with their experiences.

Today our committee tackled the problem of choosing the name for our tool.  We’d started the brainstorming yesterday and went late into the night.  We kept a running list of nearly everything we’d thought of as well as some major concept words and ideas, maintaining this all in GoogleDocs.  We sat around in the hotel bar as we brainstormed, and oneweekers from other teams would pop in occasionally and offer some thoughts.  Mostly, I suspect they were laughing at us as we came up with a bevy of ridiculous-sounding ideas.  We made two strategic decisions in this process.  The first was to not choose a vague name like Omeka or Zotero, even though this is the CHNM tool-naming pattern.  We wanted the name of our tool to illustrate its function.  But of course this made it even more challenging because of the difficulty of finding unique domain names.   The second strategic decision was to cut off the name-choosing process midday, and settle with the best choice at that point so we could move on to other items on our to-do list.

Around 11am we had a list of about 20 possible choices.  Our committee members voted on our three favorites and we narrowed the list to the top 5.  We created a poll and sent it around to the entire oneweek team asking for their input.  We quickly ruled out some of the 5 names based on the feedback we received.  And a winner emerged as we realized that the other options were problematic for one reason or another.

By 2 pm we had a mockup of the website front page (thanks to Trevor Owens).  We presented this to the all-team meeting in the early afternoon and received positive feedback.  After that, our team hunkered down with Jeremy Boggs as he took us through the steps for writing the wordpress theme for our site.  He wowed us as he worked on three projects simultaneously while taking our ideas from conception to reality.  Trevor also helped us continue on with our work when Jeremy moved on to other duties.  Dan and Tom sat down with us throughout the day and gave valuable support to our efforts, too.  I don’t think there’s any way that we could be accomplishing this project without the mentoring from the CHNM folks, and I appreciate how much of a educational experience they’re making this process for us.

By 5pm we were writing taglines, website verbiage and to-do lists for shwag, targeted outreach possibilities, conferences, and the like.   We also continued to brainstorm logo ideas.  In just a few minutes we’ll meet back in the hotel lobby to continue our work on the logo.

Throughout the afternoon several non-Outreach oneweekers wandered over to our workspace and offered suggestions for us.  I got the sense that most of them were excited about what we’d come up with and were eager to offer their input.  At the same time, I felt that most of them were glad not to be doing the outreach work, and were happy with their roles on the other teams.  Because we chose our own roles, we each seem to be sitting in just the right spot for our individual proclivities and skills.

We began the day by facing the whiteboards full of brainstormed ideas from yesterday.  We then added to and refined some of the ideas on the boards.  Mostly, we asked ourselves what we’d forgotten the previous day, and filled in gaps. To narrow down the dozens of ideas on the boards, we each took 3 sticky notes and placed them by our favorites.  This yielded six major ideas/projects.  For each of those projects we discussed exactly how we imagined their implementation.  Then there seemed to be a general hesitancy among the group about how we should proceed.  So we turned to twitter, sending out the ideas and asking for input.  Dan stayed behind to tabulate the votes while the rest of us went to lunch.  Interestingly, at lunch I heard a lot of avid advocacy for some of the less-popular choices.  When we returned and saw the twitter tally, it seemed obvious that not everyone on the team agreed with the crowdsourced choices.

We then evaluated each option in terms of their feasibility, audience, impact, extensibility, and sustainability, and discussed even further how we imagined their implementation, especially what the immediate product would be and how new features could be rolled out in the future.  We then voted by secret ballot, everyone being allowed to vote for their top three choices.  Almost without exception, we all chose the same three tools.  Then we voted for just two of those three, with our second choice being weighted at 50%.   That was a sobering moment.  The tool that garnered the highest score was actually most everyone’s second choice, with the top choices being split among the two other tools.  That caused some concern, and I wondered if we would re-count or re-think the decision.  I felt sort of let-down that my first choice actually received the most “first-choice” votes from the team, but that we’d be developing a different tool.  It took me a moment to get over that, and to get as excited about the winning project as I had been about the one that I’d hoped we’d develop. [Note: the tool that we're building will not be publicly announced until the close of #oneweek.]

And then, the work began.

We clarified, as a group, exactly how this tool would work and how it would be built.  We went around the room and chose our roles for the project, and then began some rough discussion of how we would proceed.  However, it was dinnertime and there was some aimlessness and frustration.  It seemed evident that we needed some leadership and some better-defined plans.  We separated for an hour with the charge to think about what we wanted our role in the project to be, and reconvened later at the hotel.

From the discussion at the hotel, three separate teams emerged: Development, User Experience, and Outreach.  We re-defined which team we wanted to be on.  We chose leaders for each of the teams.  We ensured that all of the bases were covered for the project.  And then we separated into our subgroups and started working (and working and working).

It’s quite late now and I’m a bit too tired to offer much analysis of the experience, other than to remark on just how nervous I was during the selection process this morning.  It was something akin to the jittery nerves I’ve gotten prior to giving an important conference talk.  I have a lot invested in the success of this project already, and I really want it to be useful and important to my community.  (And it will be.  Y’all are really gonna love this tool.)

At each of these events I’ve learned some new aspect of DH work.  At DHSI I learned a specific piece of software to aid in a project to complement my dissertation research.  While at the events in London I broadened my view of the DH field to include the concerns of scholars from all over the world, and including those whose institutional models and conditions are quite different from my own.  Additionally, I began thinking more broadly about larger-scale project-based DH work, especially the challenges of using crowd-sourced data and development.  All of this, has, in some fashion prepared me for the work I’m doing at One Week | One Tool, as has my recent small-scale development work from my new position at Chapman University.

Today was our first intense day at OW|OT meetings, where we were “talked at” by the lead developers of the Omeka and Zotero Projects.  Jeremy Boggs started us off by giving us an overview of Project Management principles.  It was a lot to absorb in such a small space of time, with concepts like BaseCamp/37 Signals, Trac, Github, version control, and the like bandied about.  He discussed testing procedures and the merits of an active user community for solving problems.  All of Jeremy’s talk was helpful to me, as someone who’s barely getting her foot wet in the field of project management.

Trevor Owens then discussed his work with Zotero, specifically focusing on the outreach necessary in creating a community of users for a tool. He explained that he’s become an ombudsman for Zotero rather than an evangelist (he leaves the evangelism to the user communities).  My rough-ish summaries of his main points:

-Outreach should be ever-present & part of the planning process (not at the end of things)

-Value proposition: Your users need to see the to see the utility of your tool immediately, in 5 minutes or less.  Build in gratification points.

-Leverage existing communities: i.e. Zotero used babblezilla community for translation, building community through targeted email, etc.. Look for forums where potential users are already gathered.

-Focus proselytizing on those who will teach others to use tool, not just users.

-Look reputable by whatever means necessary. Build trust through the polish of the site & the brand.

After our meetings and some discussion, we moved on to brainstorming about the tool that we’ll be creating together this week.  The brainstorming brought out numerous provocative ideas.  Most of them reasonable, but some were obviously beyond the scope of what we could tackle given our short timeframe.  Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this discussion was the breadth of the ideas.  To me, all of them sounded plausible (and even necessary).  With our list I could well imagine a year of DH where every week there was a Tool created.  And even then we couldn’t have developed them all.

However, tomorrow will be the day of decision.  We’ve been tasked with selecting “our” tool by noon.  I suspect that it might take a bit longer and that some team members will feel disappointed when their idea isn’t selected.  Perhaps it will even be me who’s disappointed…which is a concern given that I will be promoting this product over the next year.  I want it to be something that I can care passionately about(!).  But I also want it to be something that we can agree on as a group.  I’m hoping that it can be both.  So….stay tuned to find out what happens!

As we work to expand the project, I have been looking for other examples of history over the air, audio programs either made for radio or podcast on the Web. Of course one local example came to mind, along with New Books in History, the podcast lectures of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Library of Congress and other history venues, and walking tours, from Civil War battlefields to urban streets. Then there are the history talkshows, most notably BackStory with the American History Guys, who always seem to be having a great time.

For short-form work, I found the great pieces in the BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects series, and the historical commentaries offered on a few National Public Radio affiliate stations, from Nevada Yesterdays to a Moment of Indiana History and the seemingly defunct PA History. Personal histories appear weekly thanks to StoryCorps, and the NPR website’s search function finds a number of stories tagged for “history.”

A Google site works to collect a scattershot set of history over the air, from church historians to 8th-grade projects; interesting work is definitely lurking within. And then, topping the iTunes history podcast charts, there is the fun Stuff You Missed In History Class and the edgy Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, which explore the world past in the manner closest to RadioLab and This American Life (which has its own list of keyworded history programs.)

So – how much history do you listen to? Have I missed your favorite outlet? Are you trying to broadcast your view of the past? We look forward to hearing from you, and perhaps a snippet from my student’s project will appear here, improved by all those suggestions, someday soon.

I’ve just come home from the World History Association annual meeting—this time working on a suggestion for keeping some of the engaged, informal appeal of a summertime conference going well after the last of the book exhibit has been taken down. (Thanks to all the publishers who came—and shipped many of their wares. I think this was the most robust book exhibit yet at the WHA.)

At a round-table on narratives in world history, an audience member asked the provocative question: what book do you wish you had written? The conversation morphed into a discussion of books that were especially seductive or transformative: what texts encouraged us to be historians?

At Terry Burke’s suggestion, all the audience members listed their favorite books—the ones we wished we’d written, or the ones we read that prompted a change in our understanding of the field of history. Tonio Andrade took home the scraps of paper and started a bibliography. Being a bit compulsive myself about Zotero, I started a new public group library: World History Narratives, available to browse at http://www.zotero.org/groups/world_history_narratives/items

The 26 books named by those at the roundtable are identified by the tag 2010-WHA-participant contribution. The library is public—and open—so anyone can join the group and then add comments or contribute other titles. (You can also delete items, but please don’t; we’d like to keep a record of everyone’s suggestions.) We hope sharing the list will prompt more contributions, and comments on the books already here.

To set some context for the roundtable, it began with Tonio’s invitation to think about the role of narrative in world history. For him, this begs questions about the possibilities of micro history or biography in world history. Bob Strayer structured questions about defining and selecting the narratives in world history courses. Giancarlo Casale focused on what he calls the “narrative problem” of pre-modern world history as the field contends with the long tail of Western Civilization narratives that world history seeks to supplant. Nancy Toff offered solid editorial wisdom in form of “vitamins” for those who write literary history, an A-Z list of practical do’s and don’t’s of good prose. For me, thinking about narrative meant asking about the relationship between prose structure, argument, evidence and world historical questions. If New World History is an attempt to explore and explain the experiences of common humanity while eschewing a single totalizing narrative, then what space is left for narrative?

There’s lots of room for narrative, if the enthusiastic and informed conversation by the “audience“ (in quotation marks because their contribution sustained the conversation of the panel throughout the session) is any indication. Armed with a great summer reading list (and some recent releases from the book exhibit), I’m looking forward to both contemplation and production of world history narratives in the coming months.

[cross-posted from History Compass Exchanges]

This episode is another joint venture with The China Beat blog, a recording of the conversation between Jeff Wasserstrom and Mara Hvistendahl held at UC Irvine on April 23rd.  As described on the China Beat, “The lively discussion covered Hvistendahl’s experiences in China, the differences in writing for a popular audience as an academic versus as a journalist, and Hvistendahl’s current book project (due out in 2011) on prenatal sex selection and gender imbalance.”  Jeff Wasserstrom also discussed his recently-released book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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The second thing to know is that our Writing of History class was enthralled. After weeks of exemplary and experimental history, of debating rules for what historians can and cannot do, and after testing new voices and styles for themselves, they found Sandweiss’s book had a perfect balance: the well-documented early career of Clarence King, and the mystery of his later years; the unknown origins of Ada Copeland Todd King, and her late-in-life descriptions and documentable life in New York; fame contrasted with privacy; traditional archival sources with the gems of the age of searchable-database research; and the great abstract American notions of race and class on display in intimate detail.

Having heard Sandweiss talk about the project when it was in development, I remember her enthusiasm about finding the Census description; finding the living descendents; and discovering a way to tell this seemingly impossible story of how a man who hobnobbed with Henry Adams and John Hay, across the street from the White House, could hide his ex-slave wife and their children in plain sight in Brooklyn, and how he could hide his other identity (“true” identity seems too much) from them.

Most of us will not have the opportunity to tell the story of a famous explorer with a secret family. But how can the lessons of its gripping success be generalized? Here are my suggestions:

1) Record your research experiences. I assume Sandweiss has a journal of her research days (as I do), and that she records the excitement of a new archival find, the experience of driving the streets of her history, and the questions that frustrate and then motivate. From the very beginnings of a project, it seems worth keeping such a journal, to inject those ideas that motivated the research into the writing.

2) Choose a story that resonates. As most narrative histories show, stories with modern resonances and sharply drawn characters attract the attention of both the writer and reader with greater attention. Some events are serendipitous—starting a book on racial passing and fame in the years before a certain Kenyan-American is elected President—but other trends and interests are predictable (as my course has seen in Rebecca Solnit’s connections from Eadward Muybridge to the “technological Wild West,” or the ways in which the Clinton-Lewinsky affair affected the sale of Debby Applegate’s book on the Beecher-Tilton scandal).

3) Most importantly, challenge yourself to write history on the edge of knowability. Sandweiss took on the challenge of documenting and describing a quirk about Clarence King often noted but never explained: the posthumous revelation of his mixed-race family. It provided a detective-story romp through the available sources; the passing references to addresses and locales; and the coincidental crossing of paths with others who wrote more, whether James Weldon Johnson about passing in New York or U.B. Phillips about growing up in Georgia. But then it involved stepping out further, beyond the sources, to trace the edge of the unknown, eliminating what was impossible and making guesses about the probable.

As Sandweiss said in an interview, “I often wished to be a novelist who could invent, with splendid omniscience, everything going on inside my characters’ heads. But I am not a fiction writer. I am a historian whose work rests firmly upon footnoted sources. When I don’t know precisely what happened at a particular moment, I signal to my readers that I am engaging in informed historical speculation by using words like perhaps, must have, would have, or likely. Two beliefs lay behind this. First, I imagine that since I know more about this story than my readers do, I have an obligation to give them my best hypothesis as to what happened. But second, since I am a historian I feel compelled never to assert something with certainty unless I have very persuasive evidence.”

Historians have created ever new ways to find data, to make inferences, to know more about the past than a previous generation would have thought possible. By tracing the edge of knowability, we advance the work of history in general, pointing out the edges and inviting new expeditions to determine what more can be mapped. Some, like Simon Schama, have chafed against these limits and all those perhapses, and jumped into the crevasse; but most historians seem to note the unknown (often internally, and not explicitly) staying away while leaving those who follow without a guide.

By tracing that edge so delicately, delineating what is known, what can be known, and what cannot be known, Sandweiss draws us into her work as a historian, and into the beguiling mysteries of Passing Strange. It is an intimate, powerful history—one made more powerful by the moments where Sandweiss highlights that which remains unknown.

On Thursday, the conference was hitting its stride: the book exhibit was lively despite its dungeon location, with two great history reads, Shadows at Dawn, by Karl Jacoby, and Passing Strange, by Martha Sandweiss, being signed in paperback and handed out for free. The Hilton’s one-hour-free-Internet-in-the-lobby policy brought folks together at the outlet-studded high perches, with the location between the doors, the elevators, and the bar giving a communal feel to the digital checkups.

With a shortened trip, I missed the afternoon workshops on podcasting and Web 2.0, including a chance to hear Brian Balogh talk about his great collaboration on the radio program/podcast BackStory With the American History Guys with Ed Ayers and Peter Onuf. And it may seem like cheating to report on my own panel, “Where is the Culture of Print?” But my co-panelist Robb Haberman and our commentator Trish Loughran made some great points about print culture and communication networks in the early republic which seem quite relevant for understand the intersection of history and technology.

Haberman described efforts by an early imprint called the  Boston Magazine to survey the country in 1780s, and continuations of the effort by the Massachusetts Historical Society in the 1790s. The Magazine planned to have a gazetteer describing every town in the nation, its key businesses, landscape features, and more; they barely finished Boston and Sussex County. The Historical Society outsourced the work, sending surveys to town leaders throughout the country; they got responses from the Boston area, and a bit more of New England. An early American effort at crowdsourcing had failed.

Living in the era of zillions of Internet reviews, these historical examples can remind us to be suspicious of who is volunteering information, and what they plan to gain. (I am reminded of my visit to Cairo more than a decade ago, when many “helpful” Cairo residents gave directions that all led through their cousin’s shop.) Can crowdsourcing work for historical knowledge, whether in Wikipedia articles or the status of job searches? Like other kinds of surveys, do we need to know more about response rates and demographics, and think about “margins of error”? Clearly every student doing an assignment does not produce the same quality of work, so we should expect quality glitches in crowdsourced data as well.

Of course, crowdsourcing can lead to brilliant gems turning up: as Loughran reminded the room, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was intended as a response to a French survey sent to all the colonies—Jefferson was simply the only one to respond, and at length. Loughran urged attendees to combine an interest in the where of print, when it comes to regions, networks, and city formation, with the what of print – remembering that print gives readers only an illusion of intimacy with authors, a clever effect of a “translocal, transhistorical fiction that looks like knowledge.” The Internet may be our most familiar way to bridge time and space now, but its lessons offer important ways to reconsider the earlier history of communication technologies as well.

Readers, any more tips from the OAH on digital humanities or the innovative writing of history?

This episode of the Making History Podcast features New Yorker writer Peter Hessler (author of the books River Town, Oracle Bones, and  Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory) in conversation with Professor Kenneth L. Pomeranz, on where China’s been and might be heading.

This latest episode of the podcast is a joint venture with The China Beat blog, and was also supported by several UCI organizations including the Department of History, the Humanities Collective, and the Center for Asian Studies.

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