Tag Archives: Crossroads Project

Last month I set up a blog for the American Studies Crossroads Project as a way to keep people up to date with changes made to the site. Since 1995, Crossroads has provided a comprehensive and integrated platform for pedagogical, scholarly, and institutional information for the international American Studies Community. New content is being added, including a future exhibit on the organization of disciplinary knowledge on the web. Visit the blog, and subscribe by RSS or email.

If you haven’t seen Crossroads in a few years, give the main site a look as well – it has a terrific new design and some useful material for teaching and learning in American Studies.

Following the recent indexing of Cliopatria‘s History Blogroll, it’s worth offering a side-by-side comparison of two different approaches to academic blog directories. This follows several months of experimentation of approaching my goal to establish an American Studies blog directory as part of the Crossroads Project. The two fundamental differences between the directories I’ve seen deal with categorization and aggregation. My purpose isn’t to criticize any approaches, but spur discussion on how to measure authority and organize the content of academic blogs.

Museum Blogs.org
http://museumblogs.org/
Despite its “forever beta” tagline that’s suspiciously similar to Clioweb‘s “history is a perpetual beta”, Museum Blogs is the best academic blogging directory I’ve seen. The site topically categorizes museum blogs, and aggregates them into one large feed on their homepage. What’s interesting is how they use “authority” to filter results – blogs with more authority become more visible. Authority is determined based upon how many people link to the blog, which is likely an outgrowth of using Google’s custom search. Anyone can create a Google custom search for free – allowing them to search the text of specified websites, a terrific tool that’s easy to use when creating a blog directory. Several of my readers may want to consider adding their blogs to the directory.

Cliopatria’s History Blogroll
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/9665.html
I was pleased to see myself included in the Blogroll, and appreciate the indexing work of Jonathan Dresner. My first observation was that my blog is listed under United States History – ok. True, my background is in American Studies, but my own blog often deviates from US history, dealing more with the digital humanities and ludology among other things. It’s obvious that Jonathan was aware of these limitations when indexing it in the first place, writing:

Categories are an abstraction. Many blogs do not categorize well. We’ve done the best we can. Neither category, order or position are intended as value or quality judgements.

Despite the limitations of abstraction, I’ve found the blogroll to be an incredible resource – finding many terrific history blogs just this afternoon. Authority is decided by whoever created the blogroll, however when users have left comments pointing to their individual blogs, they’ve been included in the blogroll as well. Individual posts haven’t been aggregated into one feed, and users must visit each individual blog to read their contents.

The Crossroads Project Blog Directory
I’ve been working on creating an American Studies blog directory for the Crossroads Project that combines the better parts of both the Cliopatria History Blogroll, and MuseumBlogs. Given the wide-range of topics covered within the discipline, it requires a comprehensive solution to make it usable. I’ve been working to integrate this blog directory into the American Studies Web search engine I created last winter as well. Here’s the solution I’ve come up with:

Google’s custom search is incredibly powerful, allowing you to search the contents of each page/site indexed. My hope is to integrate this into American Studies Web, so when a blog is added to the directory, it’s also made entirely searchable. In addition, blogs will be topically tagged, so they can be included in more than one narrow categorization. I’d also like to create a master feed for each tag, where you could read all American Studies blogs tagged as “gender studies” or “material culture.” These are all reasonable and relatively simple additions to make.

A step beyond this integration would be to categorize each individual post, based upon upon the contents of each. You could use the tags associated with each post, however bloggers are inconsistent about what tags they use, and if they tag their entries at all. To some degree this necessity is diminished by the Google Custom Search. If anyone can offer any new ideas on how to approach this, I’d love to hear.

Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, and how can we begin to understand what precipitated those changes? Lastly, what are meaningful ways to convey that knowledge to students? An answer I’ve come up with is the American Studies Tagline – a timeline-based tag cloud that takes the essential American Studies texts in Lucy Maddox’s book and visualizes their contents.

The American Studies Tagline textually analyzes the articles in Maddox’s book and shows the most used words in a larger font and new terms in brighter colors. You can drag the slider to control the year – allowing you to clearly see what critics looked at, and how that has changed. I used open source software, also used by this incredible Presidential Speeches tagline which originally gave me this idea. The process was simple – I copied the contents of all these articles, dumped them into an XML file, and then used a cloud generator to visualize the text. This is something that historians and enthusiasts with limited knowledge of PHP and creating web pages can set up and use themselves.

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Last semester I had the privilege of working under the auspices of Randy Bass at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship on the American Studies Crossroads Project – an instrumental disciplinary vehicle on the web for American Studies. My most notable contribution to the site was the recreation of a search engine for websites relating to American history and culture – American Studies Web. I remain active as the digital curator of exhibitions on the Crossroads Project, including a series that will be launched over the course of the next year.

American Studies Web was created by David Phillips in 1994. In 2000, Michael Coventry and Jamie Poster revised and expanded the content and Edward Maloney converted it to a new search interface. With the help of Matthias Oppermann, I revised the content this past spring and programmed a Web 2.0 version of the search.

The idea was to create an online space for scholarly collaboration relating to the discipline of American Studies – allowing the building of community knowledge. A tagging system was established, along with the ability for users to comment and rate websites – weighting the search results based upon this feedback. Although we’re still in a testing phase in conjunction with the Crossroads Advisory Board, the site was launched over a month ago and you’re free to check it out.

In addition to studying the confluence of history/culture and information technology, I believe it’s important to create tools for learning. American Studies Web is just one example of tools I’ve created, in addition to my Oregon Trail Survey and a visual historiography of American Studies that is starting to take shape.

I’d like to welcome everyone who recently began aggregating my feed, and encourage those who read my site to subscribe to Finding America to have my entries delivered directly to you. Another recent change is that users can now leave comments without logging in. These were suggestions made in an blog entry by Tom Johnson called “Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog” – I’d highly reccomend it. Thanks Tom for sharing this link on this week’s Digital Campus podcast.

This past week I began a position at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I’m currently doing web programming and working on an up-and-coming CHNM project that’s very exciting. I’ll also continue to work on the Crossroads Project at CNDLS as the Digital Curator in charge of a series of online exhibitions we’ll launch in the next year.

This upcoming Wednesday I’ll be joining Rob Pongsajapan and Garrison LeMasters to discuss research in Second Life at the TLISI Virtual Worlds workshop at Georgetown. In preparation – expect one or two SL-related posts in the upcoming days. And yes, Jeremy, I have some future posts on the Oregon Trail in the works as well.