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.

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.

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.

Visualization tools tend to be confusing, especially tag clouds. Since the American Studies Tagline charts both the frequency of key words, as well as indicating how new terms are, I think its usefulness is clearer. In particular, the ability to use the slider – moving through articles in consecutive time periods allows visitors to travel through disciplinary history. A great example of how this could be used would be to look at the emergence of “ideology” within these texts, and then encourage students to analyze what texts use the term, when it came about, and engaging in dialogue about how that relates to shifts in thinking.

My plan is to include an improved version of this tagline in a future Crossroads Project exhibition. I’m interested in hearing from American Studies professors and students who use the tagline – particularly about what the tagline can tell you, ways they’ve used it, and how it fails and/or succeeds as a learning tool. A future version of this tagline will include a list of strategies for using this and similar history visualizations, and perhaps a greater library of visualized texts.

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.

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.