H9808A 2009 02 Infinite

Return to UWO History 9808A Digital History Fall 2009

The web is unimaginably large and growing rapidly, yet the individual pieces that make it up are ephemeral, loosely connected and of low average quality. This week we focus on the nature of the web, on the tools we use to measure and navigate it and on its utility for historical practice.

• Anderson, "Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History," to appear in Interactive Frictions, ed. Marsha Kinder & Tara McPherson (2009).
  

• Battelle, "The Database of Intentions," John Battelle’s Searchblog (13 Nov 2003). A revised and expanded version appears as chapter 1 of The Search.
  

• Cohen & Rosenzweig, "Exploring the History Web," Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
  

• Grafton, "Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents," The New Yorker (5 Nov 2007).
  

• Gralla, "Ch 4 Understanding the Internet's Software Structure", "Ch 5 How Internet Addresses and Domains Work", "Ch 11 How Email Works (Ch 14 7th ed.)"
  

• Internet Archive, "About the Internet Archive," (n.d.)
  

• Lyman & Varian, "How Much Information? Executive Summary." School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.
  

• Rosenzweig,"Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (Jun 2003): 735-762.
  

• Wilkinson, "Remember This? A Project to Record Everything We Do in Life," The New Yorker (28 May 2007).

• Gralla, "Ch 6 How Routers Work"
  

• Terminal Time
  

• USC Shoah Foundation Institute

Begin to connect with an online community. Go to your account at Twitter and follow all of the feeds of your classmates. You can use your web browser for this, but you might find that a Twitter application / widget is more convenient. If you haven't done so already, add the blogs of your classmates to the blogroll on your own blog. Next, go to Cliopatria's History Blogroll and find at least four or five blogs that look interesting and are related to your own interests. Add those to your blogroll, too. Then set up a feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines so you can follow the blogs on your blogroll without having to check every site one-by-one to see what is new.