Chapter Two: Getting Started

I have lots of different posts for this week, so my thoughts on chapters two are going to be relatively consolidated.

Rosenzweig and Cohen's chapter "Getting Started" was just that. A look at the bare essentials in beginning to build an online historical project. They introduced some important language, tools, and ideas about creation a website or a web tool. But more importantly they introduced questions to ask before beginning your project, as well as some simple rules to follow.

What I found was an analysis of basic web principals overlapping with the basics of good history. They write,

"The simple but elegant idea behind HTML is thus to 'wrap' passages of text with text markers, or tags, that identify the passage’s contents, much like the front and back cover help to identify the contents of a book."

It is an interesting suggestion that the physical book itself is a code that limits the way we write and what our finished text looks like. A page dictates exactly how many words across the reader will find on the page. The design and format of the book is not an accident either. Either in this chapter or chapter four, there is the suggestion that our modern book is the product of an evolutionary inventive process in which humans figured out exactly what works best for them (for example, it's rare to find a book that takes two arms to use or carry, or lines of text so long that the reader loses one's place).

Another interesting point raised by Rosenzweig and Cohen, it the meta-textual quality of producing history on the web.

"Indeed, a significant feature of the web is that anyone who writes a web page also exposes to the world the code used to create it. Historians should find this nicely matches our discipline’s emphasis on the open dissemination of knowledge."

Writing history "exposes" the "facts" used to create that history, as well as the "between the line" elements in ANY writing process -- who is the author? what biases does she have? from what time or model is she writing?