Open Access…

…is awesome. I’m poor, and this is an easy way to get information I might need for my research. It helps people in poor and developing countries do research and stay current on trends in their fields, especially those in the medical field in, say, Zimbabwe.

Digitial everything is here to stay. I know there is the argument that this violates the free market. But really, I don;t think it does. I think this can be part of an unregulated market. No one forces researchers to give money to make their work open access.  And people are ingenious, so I’m sure they will find a way to make open access journals and other things profitable. i mean, there is a huge potential demand for them all over the world. How many thousands of universities and high schools that want their students to get into college exist? Government agencies, museums, archives, historical sicieties, libraries? Thousands upon thousands more. There is a huge market to license journals to. And if they do it for free, they can certainly wait a period of 3 or 5 years before adding journal issues to open access archives, thus making those who really need to read it pay for it, and then letting it slip into the open access after the time expires. Advertising can be used as well.

I like open access because it allows a poor person like me to have more resources at my disposal for research, which is hard enough as it is.

“From Babel to Knowledge,” “The Differences Slavery Made,” and Wordle, Oh My…

So I’ve been doing the readings for Tuesday, and I’ve enjoyed them. First of all, after reading “from Babel to Knowledge,” I want H-Bot, an example of QA technology. This would easily let me answer factual questions online, like, “When was Lincoln assassinated.” It’s a nice little took I can use myself, or if I become a teacher, I could have my students use for their homework or studying for tests. Love it. In fact, It’s bookmarked on my netbook for schoolwork. Awesome

 

Ok, secondly, I enjoyed the website “The Differences Slavery Made.” This is a great website. It has sections outlining the main arguments that the authors are trying to make when comparing the counties of Franklin, PA and Augusta, VA.  But then it offers all the evidence they used in digital format, including drawings, maps, letters, diaries, etc. If it cites a newspaper article, then the website has a link to the article so you can look for yourself. The site also lumps the evidence in categories, like commerce, crops, campaign of 1860, property, race, religion, and town development, all to show the differences and similarities of these two counties. All of this allows the reader to decide for himself where and how he will analyze their evidence they present. It’s not like a book where you go in one direction to the finish, in this website, you take your own path to analyze the evidence. I loved it.

 

Oh, and my last bit. I also loved Wordle. Word clouds are fun. I plugged in the entire text from a paper I’m writing right now in History 711 on the media’s portrayal of the Nez Perce War, an Indian conflict in Montana and Idaho in 1877, and I got to see the words that were used the most and had the greatest weight in my paper. I wasn’t surprised to see the results, but it was an interesting way to look at my writing from another angle. Plus, I can print off my pretty word cloud. So Yeah, I liked it.

 

So no snarkiness from me this week. I liked all three of these. I haven’t Read the book and accompanying article yet, but I’ll let you all know what I think of them by the end of the weekend.

Who Wants to See My Website Slides?

You do? Then click below!

Just, uh, look at it as an actual presentation or you’ll be confused.

SacFox Nation

Fun With Digitization

Ok, hopefully I’ll actually be here tomorrow to talk about this post (stupid sicknesses).

So digitization for my site. I gots me some ideas for it.

When it comes to actually constructing my site, there will only really be digitization for my photo files and videos. Photos will be of the objects that I will describe on my website. I just decided that I’m going to hire a firm to do this, because it’s so time consuming and there are lots of things that can go wrong. You get just a few bits in a file wrong, and it won’t work. PERIOD. So I need a company to do this for me. But I’ve got some guidelines that I’d want followed.

1) I want to have Tiff files of every image going into my database to store just in case something goes wrong and I need to replace them.

2) Files on the actual site will be in JPEG format, because they will take up less room on the server and will still be nice and clear to use.

3) I want my photos to be 24 bit color. Black and white just won’t cut it on this website at all for me.

4) I’m going to use Quicktime for the videos that will be used to describe how objects are used in the current day, and I will also use this for the language section, because I plan to just have videos for the language sessions as well.

5) What I’d like to do is take photos of the objects myself, and I’d use a digital cameras and turn over all the photos to whatever company that I use to encode them for the website. This will allow me to have my own copies of them, especially when I or others would be doing write-ups of the objects and artifacts in the database for the servers.

6) I’d like to use XML format when coding any items for the site, because I’ve heard over and over again how simple it is to use. But I guess that would be up to the company that would be coding everything for the website.

I guess the quality control would be up to the company’s standards. It’s another reason why I’d like to use one for coding of the site. I just know I’d mess it up somewhere along the way, haha. We all know, like I said earlier, that in coding, even 95% accuracy will show up in serious errors. Files might not work at all, or there might be typos or other discreptancies that might be hard to find and could hurt the integrity of the site itself. So I don;t want that to happen, so I’d be willing, if this is an exercise in something I’d want, to pay the money to make this happen.

So preservation. This is something I need to talk about in class. I know I need to have a backup. I’ll probably have two…in different locations. Should they be on different servers, or should I just buy two different external hard drives that can be one Terabyte each to store all this information on so that if something happens I can grab one and somehow get the information to a server to quickly get the site back up and running? Also, I plan on frequently updating my Quicktime files so that they can keep being used in the future. I’d like the developers of the code to use good documentation when creating it so that in the future if an issue comes up I and others I will have help me to either fix the code, update it, or write entirely new code will know exactly the particulars of how the website’s code was written and why. I have the feeling I’d be a pretty demanding customer for whatever firm I hire to create the code and digitize my videos and phot files, but whatever, they’ll live. I like the idea of using a README file like the book said in chapter 8 (pg 231) to write notes on when I might have added a search engine, or when I uploaded photos or had code written, etc, so I can keep a good file of the website’s production and maintenance. Finally, I am confident my site would be around for a long time because it would be the home website of an entire American Indian nation. I’d hope that they would either have the $ to keep it running or we would try to have an institution take care of it, like a local university, a state government, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs? Who knows. But that would obviously be the ideal for this website.

Lets move on to GoogleBooks and Open Library. I dislike both sites. I didn’t really find what I was looking for in them. I did 2 searches. The first was of Brave New World. GoogleBooks let me see a limited preview only. Open Library had nothign on it. Then I tried 1984. GoogleBooks also only had a limited preview, and open Library said it had a full text version for me to read, but when I clicked on the link got an error message, so I couldn’t read it. I think Ill just stick with going to a real library for another 5 years before I trust this technology. Sorry if that sounds snarky, but I didn’t have a very good experience with the sites, and after trying for 10 minutes on each, I lost my patience.  Though GoogleBooks looks prettier as a website.

All right, hope that made sense to you all. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.