…Really just spitballing, here…
...And before anyone accuses me of being grotesque or bringing bodily fluids into this, Answer Girl gives a good definition of the term here. I use the phrase a lot, but sometimes I get a funny look, so I thought I'd start with that caveat...
Before I even knew that this was the week we're talking about wikis in the history and new media class, I thought of one possible idea for something I might like to do as a project related to that class-- just because it occurred to me and seemed like a good idea. And I guess I'm throwing this out to you all, in part, because I'm wanting to see if anyone else would be interested in working on this, because wikis are so inherently collaborative...
Would anyone else be interested in working on a historiography wiki? It seems like something that could potentially be a useful tool and a edifying thing to work on...
The way I'm picturing it is this: it would work like any other wiki, but specifically focus on the historical, linking history with historians. You could have pages on historians, which might include major works, their academic/intellectual pedigree, who influenced them, who they influenced, topics and periods covered, etc. These could then be linked to other entries, about specific books, periods, areas, etc. The advantage of it would be that, once it took on some volume, you could go to one place to find out who to start with if you want to find out about a specific topic, say, or who some contemporary historians covering your time period are to a text you're reading.
I think it'd be useful, too. It could be a great study tool for people trying to prep for comps-- not just as a resource, giving information, but as a way of cataloging what you've read. Writing pages about books you've read would help solidify them in your mind. And the collaborative nature of wikis would mean that others could point you to other readings that might benefit you, via edits and hypertextual connections...
Any thoughts? Anyone interested? Anyone think it's a bad idea? Why?
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At any rate, toward that end, I poked around on Wikipedia, trying to get a feel for how complex it was, etc. I have to admit, it was intimidating looking at all that code! I wasn't sure what I was looking at...
Eventually, I figured out that part of the reason is that Wikipedia is coded in XHTML, which is apparently sort of like the bastard child of HTML and XML... And since you might say I have "small HTML and less XML," this hybrid was a bit confusing. But then I got to thinking: how much of this is just stuff that's on every page? So I looked. I tried to find two pages on two fairly unrelated topics-- so they were likely to have few authors in common. I picked the entries on The Germs and Rodolphe Töpffer. Two fairly unlike topics. Once I did that, I was actually impressed at how similar the two pages were, despite their different material.
The basic Wikipedia format is a standardized Cascading Style Sheet. Most everything looked the same, when viewing the source code, for several, several lines. There were some things that were in one entry, though that weren't in the other. I started looking at these. The first thing that caught my eye was that on the entry on the Germs, this section:
| The Germs | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Los Angeles, California |
| Country | United States of America |
| Years active | 1977 – 1980, 2005 – present |
| Genres | Punk rock |
| Labels | Slash Records |
| Past members | Darby Crash Pat Smear Michelle Baer Dinky Lorna Doom Dottie Danger Donna Rhia Nicky Beat Don Bolles |
Is done through a series of tables-- though the code that controls a lot of how tables look, their color, things like that-- can be found in the CSS. That makes sense, as you'd want something like Wikipedia to have a fairly uniform appearance... (As an aside, check out who "Dottie Danger" really is-- it might surprise you!)
((As a further aside, 'cause I know a lot of you are novice geeks like me, and might not know such things, and be learning by trial and error-- I had to edit the above table just slightly... when I just cut and pasted it out of the source code from Wikipedia, it wasn't redirecting. I looked at the source code, and figured out what it was: the href tags were redirecting as if you're already in Wikipedia. So to make it work, I just had to change this:
<a title="Record label" href="/wiki/Record_label">Labels</a>
to this:
<a title="Record label" href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_label>Labels</a>
which makes sense-- without the http bit, it was trying to transfer it WITHIN the site, and didn't know it was referring to an outside one...))
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Well, I could keep on talking, but I'm probably only proving my ignorance, so I'll quit with that now-- enough "under the hood" talk from the guy who doesn't know a crankshaft from a carburetor.
However, before I close out this entry, for anyone else who's interested in getting deeper into this coding and web design stuff, but maybe not the most familiar with the ins and outs of it, you've probably found, like I have, that just Googling for unfamiliar terms and tags tends to just give you a lot more unfamiliar terms and tags... I've found HTMLdog.com's HTML for Beginners and their CSS for Beginners pages to be pretty simple to read and informative. Once I finish both of them, I'll check out their intermediate pages, and report back on those. Anyone who knows of other similar sites, feel free to send 'em along.
In which our author remembers that design is important…
Reading Digital History was an interesting experience. The sections on design really challenged me to think about my own sense of style and design-- something that I admit I've mostly left to the level of instinct and convenience 'til now. When it comes to my activities online, I've usually gone for the simplest pre-fab design available-- whatever doesn't look too flashy, or too "the Internet circa 1998." (If you want a good example of this sort of ugliness, check out Myspace, or any Geocities fan site that hasn't been modified for ages... or, if you're looking for a bit of ironic fun, the Paperrad art collective's web page.)
Beyond that, the only thing I've really taken any sort of aesthetic "stand" of any sort on is my cartooning, and since my foot's strongly in the primitivist camp on that one, I've just forced myself to draw what comes naturally, without really questioning what or why or wherefore. Even when I was doing digital scans of my work and altering them for the little gallery show I was in this summer, I when about my Photoshopping much more quickly and thoughtlessly than did my friend I was showing with, a professional designer. Other than when functionality is defeated by design, or when it's just plain ugly (again, see Myspace...) I've never really questioned the underlying purposes that make for good design-- the reasons some things work well, and others don't. I've been satisfied to keep it simple, clean, and when at all possible, "natural."
So of course after reading the sections on design, when I logged back into Typepad, my first response was to spend 45 minutes tinkering with design elements that, in the end, make very little difference. I went to a full justify on the columns, because I simply find full justifies to be more readable-- probably because they hark back to "professional" printed texts... I've never seen why, in the age of the word processor, anyone would be content to leave a document left-justified. It doesn't look "done," to me, and the jagged edges on the right side distract my eye. Frankly, I'm surprised that Six Apart made it the default on any of their pre-fab designs...
I also switched the fonts over to TNR, just 'cause I roll that way. I know that, according to Cohen & Rosenzweig, sans serif fonts are better for large blocks of text on-screen, but I just like serif fonts. Especially TNR. Again, it looks "professional," "printed." (Plus, I keep on going back to the words of a friend of mine, a designer and a psych student, who found several studies that suggested that serif fonts are easier to read, because the little details-- the tail on the "t," the crossy-thing on the "G"-- in other words, the serifs-- actually make it easier and quicker for the brain to recognize the letters... It's a sort of over-determination that speeds up recognition... Anyway, that's what she told me, once, and it stuck with me.)
(Also, just because I'm not able not to do such things, I went and Wikipedia'd "serif..." it's actually an interesting little article, if you feel like geeking out a bit further on the topic.)
At any rate, I've come to something I'm reasonably satisfied with. Actually, that's not completely true. I want to get a hold of Photoshop and put together a .jpg that I can use for a title banner, rather than just this line of text-- something a little more interesting to look at. And also, I couldn't find anything resembling an ecru or eggshell type color on any of the HTML color sheets that Google brought up... And I'd really like an off-white background, just 'cause it's gentler, and because it kind of gives that parchment-y, "historical" feel, which is good for a history blog. If anyone has knowledge of an off-white HTML color code, please-- help a brother out.
And on the note of less-is-more design, I really have nothing critical to say about The Diary of Samuel Pepys. All I can really say is "wow." It's not much to look at, but it doesn't have to be-- and I love the idea of making a group project out of the hypertextualization of a text, creating annotations that work together to improve understanding.
And the idea of "releasing" new entries on the date they were written is a great idea-- more than the simple conceit it may have started as. "Releasing" new entries in real-time (or, as you might properly call it, lag-time...) helps to create a community-- it makes the community of reader-annotators only have to make a small investment of time, or at least fosters that illusion by breaking it up. Hypertextualizing a text of any length is an arduous project, time-consuming even for a team of people paid to do so. However, by making this project something that can be done repeatedly, at will, in small chunks, the person who put it up has created a volunteer army of historians and enthusiasts to work on the task.
I think it's an amazing project, and I wish it was being done with the diary of someone who falls closer to my research areas, geographically or temporally. I'm half-tempted to steal the concept, and do it with one of the many Boston-area diarists or letter-writers-- say, someone like William Tudor or Samuel Sewall. Sewall would be especially interesting, just 'cause I remember being befuddled and confused by so many of the references made in his diaries, when I was doing my Boston Common research.
Those old diaries can feel like they're written in code, sometimes.