Chapter One: Exploring the History Web

I just want to tell interesting vignettes about historical topics, but I do want my information to be taken serious. Cohen and Rosenzweig suggests at the end of their chapter on "Exploring the History Web" that

"Before you begin the more practical steps in the journey outlined in the next seven chapters you need to know why you are taking that journey, who you hope will join you, and where you hope to go."

Why am I traveling?

I like to write (and maybe a little of I like to hear myself talk), but this originally was an exercise in writing. History is a topic I love and that I love to talk about. This is a chance for me to practice a craft that I love (writing) on topics I love (history, science, history of science, craft). It also give me a chance to contribute to the "History Web," a space that as a historian I think I will inhabit and lurk around for some time to come.

The other problem is my own lack of self confidence in continue to be a "good" historian. I've been out of school for some time, and hope to never go back (maybe). I don't even know if "traditional history" is what I would do if I did go back. I often times feel like an amateur--and I am truly. I am a more of a nerdy history enthusiast than a history. Keeping up with the new scholarship is particularly hard when it's your fifth job.

"The amateurs may have leapt ahead of the professionals in using the web as a vehicle for original publication, but their interpretations often look backward rather than forward. The amateurs could learn some historiographic lessons from the professionals while in turn teaching those who practice history as a vocation to think beyond traditional forms of publication."

Where do I fit? And maybe that's why I am traveling. To find out.

Who's coming with me?

Well, my mother is obviously coming along. She's my biggest fan. I also hope that the rest of my family and my friends join me. I'd love to work up a little following, and I think that it will start with them. I have lots of history colleagues, who I used to meet for beers and wax philosophic on any number of topics. I miss that, and wonder if this is truly the way that we will do that in the future.  Electronic beers and digital history.

Where to?

I'd like to improve my crafts--both writing and history, but really where I think I'm going is a way to set up learning modules for the Western Civilization courses that I teach. I'd like to create pages on topics, that include my lecture notes, (video or audio of my lectures? that sounds "ew"), images, podcast, interesting articles, websites devoted entirely to the subject, primary sources, and on an on. I would like to use this as a place to begin my classes, as well as a place to find fun and hopefully funny historical commentary.

So it look like I am really looking at making teaching resources website, but it definitely already has the problem that much of the History Web has. 

"If categorizing sites is so difficult, why bother? One good reason is that it forces the incipient History Web creator to think about genres themselves, what Phil Agre calls the “expectable form that materials in a given medium might take.” Genres imply, in Agre’s words, “a particular sort of audience and a particular sort of activity” and are “the meeting-point between the process of producing media materials and the process of using them.” To pay attention to genres is to think about how what you are doing relates to the audience you are hoping to reach—something less necessary “in the old days, when media were few and their uses evolved slowly,” or when they evolved in an ad hoc, organic way."