HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

Geographic coverage of Wikipedia. This shows the geographical location of articles, a geographic features, etc. Mapping Wikipedia is a collaboration between TraceMedia and the Oxford Internet Institute.

The Wikipedia page on Wikipedians - demographics, proportions, and the rest.

In response to the person who said in class that people who edit Wikipedia "have a lot of time on their hands" -- see this 2008 piece by Very Smart Guy and NYU professor Clay Shirky, who points out that editing Wikipedia is a more productive use of time than watching TV. Which, somehow, a lot of people also seem to have a lot of time to do. *** "I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?" I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system." So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years.""

Here's a tremendously engaging video of Clay Shirky giving the talk I just linked to about where people find the time to edit Wikipedia -- he thinks they probably stop watching TV. Which do you think is more productive? Another great quote from this piece: "So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."

Note that it took 13 minutes for Jonathan's malicious misinformation about Gumby to go away. Not too shabby.

Interesting article about Jimmy Wales and how he lives a modest middle class life, while running one of the most visited websites on the planet.

You should look up Craig Newmark, who founded Craigslist! Totally regular guy, although supposedly he's worth about $400 million.

This article gives a definition of Digital Restrictions Management in terms that everyone can understand. More importantly, it teaches us why we should avoid using business that use DRM and how to do so.

Huh, interesting that they say the "R" stands for "Restrictions" -- I always heard "Rights." Guess either makes sense.

Here's a recent article published in April about where people get their news.

That's useful, Milan, thanks. Note, though that it's not super-clear what "get" means in this context -- I'm sure a lot of people, like me, get their news from several of these sources. I get news from radio, the Web (including newspaper websites and Google News), and social media, and I'm not sure which of those sources is primary.

A book about the history of microfilming newspapers after World War Two. Baker then set up his own newspaper repository, which he donated to Duke Libraries in 2004.

A blog post (nearly a scholarly article) on common errors made by Optical Character Recognition, including the error of thinking that the medial S is an f.

Personally I don't think I've ever looked up a health topic on Wikipedia; I use WebMD for that. Which isn't crowdsourced, I don't think -- I think they pay people to write the content on WebMD. Still, nice idea to offer college credit!

You can use Google to search for magazines and magazine articles that date all the way back to the 1960's.

Hey, that's super-useful, Talia, thanks! When Google scanned things from research libraries, that included a lot of magazines. Or maybe Google made deals with the publishers directly for these. There are some weird titles in there, though -- no Time, no Newsweek, but you can search through _Torque_, "Singapore's best homegrown car magazine" :)

Video about one person's take on what libraries will be used for in the future. Very interesting opinion.

Hmm, interesting. The service she describes where libraries sell books is fairly rare, still, although it's made possible by a thing called an Espresso Book Machine that prints copied of ebooks: http://www.ondemandbooks.com/ I hate when I can't figure out the date of things. I even looked at the source code to try to find out when that video was recorded, but I couldn't. I did discover that the girl in the video (I love her sweater!) is one of the co-hosts of another How Stuff Works podcast called "Stuff You Missed in History Class" at http://shows.howstuffworks.com/stuff-you-missed-in-history-class-podcast.htm -- that might be useful! Certainly relevant. :) Their latest episode is about an 18th-century "Vampire Panic" in New England. Sign me up.

I listen to that podcast all the time!

Quick clip on Alan Turing and his computing designs that saved millions in WWII

I found this article to be pretty interesting. It is about what scientists believe is to be the first book ever written (about 2,000 years ago!). I thought it was pretty cool!

This infographic explains why the brain finds it easier to read information presented in this way. Every day, we're exposed to more information than ever before and visuals help our brain process everything.

Michael S. Hart was one of the founding members of The Gutenberg Project. He recently passed away and this is the link to his obituary.

Thanks, Erin! He'd be a good guy to do research on for the presentation and final project.