On Friday the American Studies Association launched their new website and moved to a new server. Make sure your bookmarks point to www.theasa.net. The site is based on a networking and blogging model to foster the development of “communities†within the site, be that regional chapters or specific projects. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in the upcoming year, as well as who uses it. Are American Studies scholars savvy and engaged enough to full-utilize the site? Who uses these tools? My personal hunch is that the target audience is primarily graduate level students who are trying to make a name for themselves, but I could be wrong. The success of this could really poise my contribution to the Crossroads Project, the American Studies Web search engine for success if the ASA can foster the kind of community their new site seeks to attract.
Thanks to all who have provided some great feedback on my American Studies tagline so far, keep it coming! I’ve already begun compiling a list of ways to improve the next version of it. Special thanks to the bloggers who have plugged this and other projects recently including Dan Cohen, Rob MacDougall, Citizen of Somewhere Else, historians in Switzerland, Tom Scheinfeldt, and others.
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.
As many of my visitors have noted over the past several months, there hasn’t been much activity on my personal website for some time – here’s a recap:
In January I moved to Washington, DC to pursue a fellowship at Georgetown University working on the Crossroads Project. Much of my time has been spent developing the American Studies Web search engine, recently released in beta.
Although I stated online that I was going to publicly release the results of my Oregon Trail survey, I have decided to withhold any final conclusions. Several individuals who were interested in learning about the results have contacted me; I encourage you to do the same but at this time it would be inappropriate for me to publicly disclose these results. Recognizing weaknesses in my own online survey methodology, I need better data to definitively draw any conclusions. With that said, I’m very surprised by the results and success of the survey. Expect an improved Oregon Trail survey to be conducted in the future!
Speaking of surveys, I’ve begun development on an online survey tool called Surveylicious. Recently I was contacted by graduate students who wish to do online surveys connecting to Facebook (Hello Jim from Stanford!); Surveylicious establishes this connection similarly to how my Oregon Trail survey worked, using the Facebook API. Fortunately, the API is now in stable release so the session problems I encountered should no longer be an issue. I’ll be blogging a lot about the development and methodology of Surveylicious.
The first weekend of May I graduate from St. John Fisher College with a degree in American Studies and minor in Information Technology.
Beyond studying the Oregon Trail computer game, several months ago I began documenting and analyzing “Wild West” computer simulations in Second Life. I am working with users in Second Life to archive these environments, many which no longer exist. Once I gain full permission to distribute these images, text, and objects I’ll post them for others to study.
Notice the new URL and feed – I’m now davelester.ORG.
