Eric Johnson’s right when he says that it’s not pertinent to use technology for the sake of using technologies. Our aim is to allow users to communicate with us and between us, to comment documents, etc.

But that’s not enough. We’re trying to know who are our users and to give them the tools they need to work with the documents we provide. To give them also the possibility to provide documents. That’s where Web 2.0 technologies can be usefull.

Quite excited to go to THATCamp and to meet all of you.

I agree absolutely that we should not be doing Web 2.0 stuff for its own sake. There is too much of that–witness the National Archives Experience site with its Flash gone wild.

What I want from Web 2.0 is a better user experience and adding value to our archive. The Washington State Digital Archives where I work is much beloved of genealogists because of the millions of records we host for births, death, naturalization, etc. These people come to our archive knowing things about our records that we do not know–that Mary Smith was also known as Mary Smyth, that Chief Garry is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, that the logo for the Aberdeen Logging Company (we also have corporation records) was briefly adopted by Nirvana.

I would like users to be able to add metadata in many categories. For marriage certificates, for instance, our searchable metadata include the names of the happy couple, the date, and I think the county. But the actual certificates (viewable online) contain lots of additional data including religious denomination, the name of the person who married them, etc. It would be great if the army of genealogists who visit our site could add those items to our searchable metadata.

To that end, the focus should really be on that conversation and sharing of knowledge and less on the tools themselves. A knowledge of those tools is key, of course–you have to understand whether a Flickr account or a Facebook page is the best way for your patrons to comment on images (or whether it’s best to do both, or something else altogether).

But the point of the exercise isn’t to “do” 2.0 technology for the sake of the technology; it’s to effectively promote and capture the conversations that happen as a result of the technology. The “2.0-ness” of the exercise stems from 1.) the openness of the communication and 2.) the ease of use for non-technical users. That’s what makes blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc. different from what came before: the technical know-how to produce online content through these tools is virtually nonexistent.

I think that emphasizing the conversation is also the way to sell “web 2.0” to non-2.0 administrators and stakeholders. They don’t need to understand each tool–they just need to understand the value that comes from lowering barriers and promoting communication. Let the geeks take care of the tech. 😉

As for the second question, I definitely vote for an “across the curriculum” approach to digital history training. I don’t think there’s an area of public history that doesn’t involve a greater understanding of the digital historical world, from fundamental primary-source research to using computers in presentations to publishing to online exhibit design. If the students imbibe digital history as a matter of course, they’ll never think of it as a “thing apart.” Maybe set up a group to examine the entire curriculum to talk about how each course might be connected to the digital world?

@Brian There is one feature (Album) on European NAvigator that allow a user to collect documents within the site, to write teir own caption / comment, to classify them (with creation of titles) and to write an introduction on top of their collection of documents. Some teachers (from high-school and/or universitie – for instance a teacher at the political studies institute in Lyon) who use this feature to prepare a course.

But that’s not going far enough.

I am definitely interested in your second topic. In the early days, I think the emphasis in digital history courses was on things like general digital theory, reviewing noteworthy web sites, and creating basic web sites with HTML, XML, and CSS. As time went by, I think these courses paid greater attention to things like design, narrative, exhibition, and teaching and learning. The next generation of courses, perhaps advanced ones that sequentially follow these previous ones, will have to get more serious about introducing students to programming. Server-side coding will be a necessary part of helping students create Web 2.0 web sites. And computational thinking and practice with algorithms will become increasingly necessary as we move toward the semantic web and increased use of natural language processing.

60 credits seems like a lot for a masters program. In my experience, these programs require only 30 credits. It sounds to me like there is some room in your program for throwing in some digital history courses. If that is not the case, can you give us some more details on the particulars of your program?

And, instead of worrying about adding new classes for students, train the faculty in the tools that might suit their areas of interest. They, in turn, might feel more comfortable integrating these into their teaching.

I just finished an introductory museum studies course taught by a professional museum curator. He relied strictly on texts, lecture and discussion, supplemented by visits to the nearby museum where he worked. Fantastic course, and I learned a lot, but I couldn’t help but think that our discussions could have been enhanced by some visuals. The museums we talked about have to be among the most photographed places on Earth, and a simple Google image search would have helped to illustrate some of what he was describing.

– That’s a good concept. Even the President is taking advantage of web 2.0 sites.

I look forward to thinking about this for the next month.

As far as the second question goes, it sounds like you and Amanda French are thinking along the same lines. You don’t have the time to teach courses on just web design in your MA program. And Amanda doesn’t want to create a silo/ghetto for digital humanities. Instead, we need to learn how to integrate them together.

@Larry and Frédéric,
An interesting document repository that I recently stumbled across and that might serve as a model is the European NAVigator: www.ena.lu/.

For your first point, you could meet with the Orbis Cascade Alliance and maybe join the Northwest Digital Archives or some other aggregate project they are currently working on. The site really doesn’t seem that bad, actually.

As for preparing your MA students for the future, the best thing you can do is introduce to them projects that use a wide variety of technologies and hope that they become interested in one and want to learn more about that technology. A lot of institutions are grappling with the concept of a digital humanities program, but each professor has his or her own idea about what “digital humanities” even means. In the past, a scholar could just take a TEI XML class and then *poof*, they’d be a digital humanities scholar. I think it’s best to stay away from actual technical training because then you are limiting your students to learning only what you are teaching. The best way to encourage students to adopt technologies in their studies is to get them interested in a particular form of technology and foster an environment in which they are willing to teach themselves the skills, providing guidance and consultation along the way.

When you start teaching web design courses, you’re going to lose the interest of people that are more interested in visualization, text mining, and GIS–all things too complex to be taught in one class.

Your first major interest joins my major interest.

I am working in Luxembourg (www.cvce.lu/). We’re editing a digital library: www.ena.lu/ (a flashy interface that we want to change). We’ve got far less documents than the Washington State Digital Archives (only 16 000 documents) but the question is the same: how to make it more interactive, usefull and Web 2.0ish.

What about a session on this? (something like digital library and Web 2.0).

Frédéric Clavert

thatcamp.org/camper/inactinique/