The Old Scholar - HI 697

The end of the road

Yeah!!! Well maybe not a BIG YEAH, but a Yeah just the same. My final project is done. I emailed Dr. Petrik with the address and my self evaluation. I just wish I had more time to add more content, add more links to other information, make my site look as good as some of yours.
I really enjoyed class this semester. We tore each others projects apart, but we all learned a lot. Last week was pretty great considering where we all started. I'm still color challenged, but I think I can get it somewhat under control.

Have fun and I'll see you around campus.

Valid HTML youtube Embed

There are probably a million different blog posts and solutions to get Youtube to embed and still have valid html code. I think I tried about 999,999,998 of them before I finally got one to work.

I found that this works
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/0i-hy_0VWZ8"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0i-hy_0VWZ8" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /></object>

All you have to do is put in the URL for the youtube you want to link to and your good. I tested it in FireFox, Safari, Opera IE6, and IE7.

That's the good news. The bad news is that my font_size now does not work on my rollover for the books. It used to work, all the other things in the Resource_container.p work. I go in and change the color and the font changes color, but it does not change it's size. I wanted to put more information in the rollover but without being able to change the font size I'm out of luck. I am also running out of time. Any ideas on why this doesn't work will be welcome. For now my solution is to not put in too much data.

The other bad news is that the rollover works on everything but Opera, and the IE6 that I have. The IE6 does display it because it says it is an invalid Active X control. I've written invalid Active X controls before - this is not it. Oh well. The degraded functionality still shows the book and gives them the link.

Why history and web are like Peanut Butter and Jelly

Barbara Natanson in Worth a Billion Words? Libary of Congress Pictures Online, an article in the June 2007 Journal of American History shows the power of the web in historical research. Natanson takes one picture which has a very cryptic description in the LOC description and gives a narrative to the subject, the photographer and the time frame of the photo. The digitizing of the photograph allows her to add context to an otherwise sterile artifact. She makes the point that the digitization of these images allows many more people to look at them and provide this context. I think what she is saying is that although a picture may be worth a 1000 words,it is only by putting it into the correct context are we able to get the right 1000 words.
    She later shows that photographs, once digitized, can be viewed in much more detail than is possible when only shown in a book. Using the techniques we learned in this class historians can make the photos accessible to more people and highlight the area of the photo and the particular reason the photo is important to a historian's thesis.
   Her last section describe a process of looking at over 100,000 photographs made by the Farm Security Administration. She says that digitization allows a collaborative effort which then allows different meta data to be provided to all of the different photos allowing for a systematic review of them that is not available now. This sounds exactly like the vision for the collaborative individual collections that GMU is trying to achieve with OMEKA. The technology to do this exists, the problem is the definition or ordering of the meta data to make it useful.
   Great article that shows that digitization and web collaboration go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly to make a great history sandwich on the web. (Oh that was bad, but I couldn't resist.)
   As you can tell I am taking a break from working on my web site by working on my paper for my other course. I came across this article and thought it was interesting.

   Good Luck to everyone on getting your final web sites done. They all looked pretty good to me on Thursday.

Coming along

Well, I've changed my design three times today. That's why I like programming databases, you just have to make them work, you don't have to make them pretty. I hire GUI programmers for that, but after this exercise I guess I should pay them more money.

Anyways, I think I have a pretty solid design, but I'm not sure of my colors for my navigation links and the rollovers. I have 2 pages done and another page with its top banner finished. Any comments would be appreciated.

If you get a chance take a gander at Jerry's site. He has made some wonderful improvements and I think it all flows together well. I really like his use of the Google Map for Coxey's March. Try it, you can see every major point along the march, and an explanation of it. It puts together the dimensions of time and location with event in a graphical presentation. 

Rollover for Images

Professor Petrik said making a rollover on images work was easy and was in our book. I tell you what, if the Stylin' with CSS book has how to use rollover with images, I can't find it. I can find how to do a rollover on a DIV with an embedded image (Page 131) which I think I will use if I use a video but it doesn't help me with doing a rollover on my nav with my images. I finally figured it out, but the next time you all see me I will have a lot less hair and it will be a lot grayer.

Thanks to Ben's web programming page and WebMasterWorld for input. But like always, the little periods, octothorpe, can kill you.

The first thing I did was make an image of what I wanted to be displayed normally. Then I made an image of what I wanted when the user rolled over the link with the mouse. I called these things like PreludeToWar.jpg and PreludeToWarRollover.jpg

In my html document I put in the following
In my Chronology div (My left column)
<div id="Chronology">
        <div id="Chronology_inner">
             <a href="#" id= "NavPic1"><span class="myalt">Prelude to War</span></a>
            <a href="#" id= "NavPic2"><span class="myalt">Conventional War</span></a>
            <a href="#" id= "NavPic3"><span class="myalt">Guerrilla War</span></a>
            <a href="#" id= "NavPic4"><span class="myalt">Consequences</span></a>
         </div>   

</div>

These are placeholders for background images.
In my CSS file I have a separate displays for each picture for instance for NavPic1 I have

a#NavPic1{
width:150px;
height:50px;
background-image:url(images/PreludeToWar.jpg);
display:block;
}
a#NavPic1:hover{
background-image:url(images/PreludeToWarRollover.jpg);
}

I also added the display instructions for the "myalt"
a .myalt {
display:none;
}
This makes sure there is space on the screen for the background image to go into, but no real data is displayed.

Now when someone rollsover the link the text changes color. You can make the second picture whatever you want, different text color, different background or completely different words.

The problem with this is that I have now put content in the CSS document and taken it out of the content page. This is a violation of separating display from content. Oh, well it works. Here it is.

Game Playing

    I am not a fan of role playing games. I'm the grandfather in Gee's book who says it's all a waste of time. Gee makes good points in his book and in the article for this week about game playing teaching people on how people learn. The tricky part is taking that information on how people learn together with something that is worth learning. We have a lot of game players in this class who went back to their old games and were amazed at how easy it was to pick up the old commands and remember the game. I guess it's a lot like riding a bike. You never forget. But with the cost of gas nowadays, riding a bike is a useful skill. Hitting the A button while depressing the green tab is not real useful.      
    Role playing games seem to have such contrived puzzles that take a convoluted logic to figure out, and they require you to have a spatial awareness of where you are in a 2d world. I have never been able to place myself in a game. I have to try and understand programmers minds all day long, and in reality that's what a role playing game is, trying to figure out the mind of the developer of the game. Looking for hidden objects in a made up world is not my idea of fun.
    Now you know what I thought of this whole game playing stuff when I began these readings and playing Myst. (I still haven't figured how to turn the power back on yet) I must thank John for providing me an article last week that makes me willing to change some of my ideas. The article pulls together the Boer War, the similarities to Britain at the beginning of the 20th Century and the U.S. at the beginning of the 21st, and reasons why the comparison is not valid. This one article helped me with my web site and my understanding of the learning concepts of this weeks readings. The article "Is America in Decline: Why the United States will Survive the Rise of the Rest" by Fareed Zakaria is in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. Zakaria says that the well known statistic that US learning in math and science is in crisis because our students score significantly worse then other countries on standardized tests is misleading. If you look at the data you find the problem is with equality, US students from affluent neighborhoods score better than the top from other countries, but US students from poor neighborhoods score significantly worse. Zakaria stated that Singapore, a country on top of the testing scores, recently sent a delegation to the US to learn how we teach our students. He quotes Thomas Shanmugaratnam, a former Singapore Minister of Education, " We both have meritocracies. Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people's talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well -- like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority." This sound just like the things Gee is talking about in the learning process of games.
    The article got me thinking about one of the best books about game playing I ever read. It's a science fiction book by Orson Scott Card called "Enders Game." The book is set in the future where mankind is battling the evil "Buggers" and is looking for their next great military leader. They try to find the leader by having kids play games in outerspace. They have a "Battle Room," which has got to be the greatest place to play army ever and instead of using a character in a video game, the kids can play and "die" and play again. Since there is no gravity all the rules of movement are thrown out the window. The book traces the learning process of Ender and how he finally succeeds by breaking all the rules. A great book to understand game playing as a way to teach critical thinking and leadership skills.
    I am more a deductive learner than an inductive one. That's why I like strategy games, like Civilization. The other article "How to Win a War" by Niall Ferguson (The link on the syllabus doesn't work, but this one does) talks about a game, "The Calm and the Storm" that seems to be up my alley, and I will probably give that one a try.
     All in all, I have spent much more time this week playing games and thinking about playing games then I had allocated in my time-line to get my web site done. So I guess I was right at the beginning, all this game playing is a waste of time.

Random Thoughts of history on the web

    While trying to come up  with a design for class I went back to asking the question "Why?" Not why do we need to design the site, but "Why do we put historical data on the web in great looking sites?" Luckily Jeff and Carl had put some examples up that gave me some ideas that have been rattling around in my head. My first question is what is the value added of making a site. Nobody puts enough information on a web site to replace a book, so what are we doing. Then I viewed Jeff's design assignment. His design has a definite purpose and I think shows the advantage of making a professional looking site for a specific purpose.  His syllabus also includes a link to a project by the University of Virginia, that actually does put all the primary sources for a book on the web. Wow, is this useful. But that is a ton of work. (Also notice the first page - it looks like someone took Professor P's class.) This site add a lot of value to a work. There are search engines for census records, letters, etc. There are photocopys of old newspapers. (Although someone did not take Professor P's class in restoration.) Overall there is a resource that is more than text and pictures.

Then I looked at Carl's site. It looks as if his information was presented in a paper for an earlier class. Adding pictures and a look and feel is nothing more than people have been doing for Atlases and picture history books. Then I stopped to think. How many times have I gone into a book store and perused those types of books, just because they added the "sizzle to the steak." How many people will come look at our sites and be initially interested in them because of their professional look and stay around to read what we have to say.

Is the fact that our work can be seen by many more people without going through the publishing hoops enough of a value added. By making a professional looking site we get more people interested in our work and that, in and of itself, is enough reason to spend about a million hours getting our colors correct but adding nothing more to the discussion of the historical topic.

I think this gets back to Professor Petrik's caution at the beginning of class. We have to know when to say stop. But the only way we know when this is if we have clearly defined why we are making our site. We need to define who we are developing the site for. Jeff has this defined perfectly. I am totally lost for my site.

I posted my design site off of my portfolio site and it also available here. Any comments are welcome.

 

Another week, another response to Elara

This week we notice another web project that constricts users’ creativity. In this case the developers realized the constraint they were putting on the user and changed their overall project. However, the changing of the museum game to allow people to go on different excursions does not increase the "game" and most people will skip that part. However, mixing the game with the ability to delve deeper allows those users who are really interested to get more out of the experience, and perhaps, become more creative. Using DePraeto's law (the 80-20 rule) means that most people will not take advantage of more information but the 20% will be able to take advantage of the greater knowledge. My basic problem is still the same, it is very easy for everyone to get caught up in believing the same thing and not go against the consensus. My question is, does the ubiquity of the internet cause this resistance to consensus thinking harder?

Oh CRAP! Where did the time go?

Wow, so much to read and absorb. Of course I loved the statistics and the use of the time axis to show the changing of data over time. I taught introductory statistics at a junior college for 5 years and getting people to see how the study of interrelationships of numbers could be interesting was always a struggle. (It may have had something to do with the instructor, but I don’t see how that could possibly be the problem.) It’s amazing what you can do with data once you apply a time axis to the data. Applying a time component to a planets position in the sky allowed Tycho Brahe, the observer, and Johannes Kepler, the mathematician, to develop the laws that allow us to plot bodies in space. Looking at data relationships using graphs is tricky though. The graphs may imply a causal relationship that is not really there. The one I used to bring up in class was that there is a direct relationship to the cost of diamonds and the number of prostitutes arrested in Quebec. It is a very strong statistical relationship but trying to assume a causal relationship between the two is just plain silly.

I did a lengthy post last week using the Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) principles from Robin Williams’ book to judge some web sites. I found that very useful.

I spent a lot of time with Douglas Bowman and his Zen CSS. I must have visited 15 different sites in that Zen Garden project. It was amazing what they were doing with CSS. They all had the same HTML and just changed the CSS. The effects were inspiring. I tried to figure out how some of them worked and I still haven’t gotten them figured out. For instance in the page by Bowman, 017.css, he uses the h3 tag to display a background image which spans some text. I see where the image is displayed but I haven’t figured out where the  text goes to. It can’t be behind the image because the html is always on top of images in the CSS. So where does it go? A mystery to be solved.

Web Site Design

John gave me a great idea with his post that pointed us to the Library of Ireland’s web site of the Easter Uprising. Since we are looking at the design of web sites I thought I would try to determine what I like about different web sites about history. I have used the two sites John has pointed us too, the Irish Library site mentioned above (Irish Site), the Mapping the African American Past (MAPP) site  (MAPP Site), a Virginia Tech site about the Mexican-American War (VT Site),  and a web site developed by a non-profit organization called the Descendents of the Mexican-American War (Mex-Am Site).  This became much too large for a blog post so I uploaded a pdf of my review. (Download Mar25.pdf) 

After reviewing these web sites I learned that it is very important to understand why the web site is being developed or users are lost (VT Site). It is very important that the main element of a site be given top billing or the user is forced to scroll and move around and gets frustrated (MAPP Site).  For historians it is important that sources and bibliographies are provided or the user is left wondering where information is coming from (Irish Site). I found that the CRAP principles were useful in helping me determine why I instinctively liked or disliked a site.

I also uploaded Vox Fire to see what a screen reader does to a web site. Having impaired sight myself I am sensitive to not being able to see. However, like Joe Clark said, all I have to do is increase the size of my screen. I don’t know how blind people are able to function using computers. I can’t remember all the things I hear when going through a screen, but I do know that a lot of web sites like CNN, and Yahoo are really not friendly for screen readers. The readings today made me realize how much I was taking for granted and not programming into my applications.