I found today’s assignment really fun to explore, trying to solve the Blocky Maze seemed easy at first but it definitely became more difficult. I was able to get all the way to the last step (#10) but there I met my match and could not figure out the order the sequence of blacks should be in (see bottom of post for screen shot of how I kept getting stuck). This game shows how programing works and each step or command is inked together with all the other commands to create a change reaction (and in my opinion, this is a tedious process). It reminded me of coding and how if one little thing is off images, text, etc wont display or perform the desired function properly. This is exactly how programing works, fitting together small commands in carefully planned sequences so that if one statement is true or a action is taken then the proper resulting action will occur. This is best demonstrated by the if-else clocks in the Blocky Maze game.

When I read about scratch and watched the video about it for today’s class it made creating videos much simpler and I understood how many of the videos I have watched were made. Up until know I wondered how anyone could know so much about programing to create such videos (even ones where the graphics were not that great) if they were not professionals who had undergone lots of training about it; now I can see how this simple programing formula/site makes that possible for anyone to create small animation videos with out to much trouble.

blocky maze #10

I used archive.org to explore the history of the Vatican’s website. It is interesting to notice how the old site layout is more linear in structure and the current one incorporates a circular design/laout in the center. The old site does not offer as many different links to click on and is not as colorful as the current one. The current site also has links now to social media sites/phone apps. The background has stayed the same however between the old site and new site.

Check them out below:

Holy See Website – October 1999

Holy See Website – April 2013

The preservation of digital records (photos, websites, articles, posts, etc.) is important because we live in a digital age where almost everything created can be digitized or has a digital component. The majority of Newspaper companies and even Magazines today have a digital version as well as a print version. Digitalization has given historians an incredible resource to preserving the past yet it has also brought with it many new challenges.

Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era by Roy Rosenzweig highlights many of these issue and is a very informative piece on advantages and disadvantages of digital media and the preservation of digital records. It also brings up a very interesting point about how the abundance of records and widely available sources of information to historians and the general public can be overwhelming and might make historical analysis seem less necessary and lessen its value. The question “will abundance bring better or more thoughtful history?” is one which deserves some thought and careful consideration. Rosenzweig also highlights the challenges of digitizing records and notes how digitized sources are not t quite as safe or secure as they might seems. I thought is was interesting how he points out that hard copy sources such as books and papers can age slowly yet if a digital file is damages in any way or if any part of it becomes corrupt the whole source is entirely destroyed. The method of digital preservation needs to be constantly re-evaluated and I think it can be concluded that sources can never be fully preserved. Items should be continually put in new digital formats, update to be able to be read by different programs and software. Digital preservation is a war that historians and archivist will have to fight for the whole foreseeable future. 

Lastly when I was taking a quiz on the LOC website about digital preservation I thought it was cool that they preserve enough digital records to equal over 66 million books in print. (that’s a lot of information!). The Digital Hurricane Memory Bank which I looked at for class this week was also a neat site. The layout and design worked well with the content and it was pleasing to look at. It was easy to use and contained lots of valuable information.

When trying to do the homework for this week’s class I was very excited about the prospect of trying out Wordle, particularly with my Hist 499 paper which was 20 pages of text without the bibliography, however to my great disappointment I could not get it to work on my computer 🙁   … I will try using a different computer later on this week and see if I can get it to work ( if so I will then post my findings!).

I explored Time Magazine Corpus and found it fairly interesting though a little confusing to figure out the way to compare data sets by years. I did some searches about how often the term “World War” was used and the result was huge. Then when I was playing around with creating searches to find out how often Time Magazine mentioned women in the workforce during the WWII time period the site stopped allowing me to generate requests and said I could not use it anymore until I registered for the site. This was frustrating because I did not want to have another site I had to 1.) register for an account. 2.) have to create a username and password for and 3.) then have a site that would send me random emails which I do not want, thus I did not sign up for it and could not finish investigating the frequency of Time Magazine mentioning, in some way or form, women in the workforce in years before WWI compared to those during and after it.

In my third attempt at conducting research with the websites/tools listed to explore and use for this week’s assignment, I finally had more success. I used the Google books Ngram Viewer and compared the number of times the words “etiquette”, “manners”, “politeness”, and “women” were found in books from the 1750 -1950 (time period ranging from a little before the American Revolution to a little after the end of WWII). This search interested me as women’s etiquette, etiquette manuals, and guides to manners is a topic I have heavily researched for my History 300 and History 499 papers. I found it interesting to see how the term “manners” was used much more in the published works than the term “etiquette”. The Ngram showed the topic of etiquette and manners was more popular right before the American Revolution during which it hit a serious decline. Near the end of the war there was a small increase in the topic’s popularity but it never reached the same level as before the war. This suggests that manners and etiquette were not a concern for the American colonists from 1775-1880’s and that books/manuals on these topics were not published and subsequently not read very much during this time period. Thus, an argument can be made using this data that the American people were otherwise preoccupied during the war and did not have time to spend reading or writing about manners, etc. or did not have the resources or desire to do so. The American colonists were using their time in other ways, most likely in supporting the troops fighting in the war, instead of writing an reading about the rules of politeness. A similar patter could be seen in the Ngram, on a much smaller scale however, when looking at the time period from WWI to the end of WWII. The results of my search of these words (a.k.a. the Ngram I conducted and am referencing this post) can be found at: Etiquette/Manners/Politeness/Women – Google Ngram Viewer Results. Over all I thought the Ngram Viewer was cool yet I wish one could see a breakdown of the information in text form and not just visually in the form a line graph.

Here is the link to a revised version of my powerpoint – it has a few slight edits but nothing major.

Papal Election 2013

I made my presentation for homework this week using the presentations function in Google Drive. I did it on a very recent moment in history, the 2013 Papal Election of Pope Francis.

Also I thought the readings for this week’s class from Tufte on the negative aspects and uses of PowerPoint and Norvig’s illustration of many of these same points in his Gettysburge Powerpoint Presentation and subsequent comments about its creation were very interesting. I definitely agree that most people over use powerpoint and often presentations are just as good without them. It is also very true that most powerpoint users do not use it well for they do not think about design elements, readability, and color schemes and thus often end up with a very unsuccessful and hard to look at presentation. When one goes to use powerpoint for a presentation one should always begin by asking oneself the question “Do I really need it for my presentation?” Very often the answer will be “no” but if the answer is “yes” however one should be very carful to when creating it so that it functions as it should, as an aid to one’s presentation, and does not become one’s entire presentation.

Many Eyes was also an cool sight to explore and I like how it can present data in so many different ways. I like how the visualizations can take on classic forms of data representation such as bar graphs and charts as well as other more artistic and design centered forms such as word trees, tag clouds, and phrase nets. My one critique of the site however was that it is a little hard to figure out how to view visualizations that others have created and upload previously.