Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Educause 2006 - Time, Space, and History

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

Time, Space, and History

Edward Ayers – University of Virginia ela@virginia.edu
William Thomas – University of Nebraska-Lincoln wgt@unl.edu

These guys have been working on visualizing history . . . and using new technologies to make this happen. They compare the weather to history – how the weather sweeps along the nation and affects things.

They also related the development of the railroad to current technology – time, space, and conceptions of time . . . the railroad changed perceptions and technology is annihilating space/time understanding.

See http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/research.html, and the Southern History Database Maps are awesome! http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/SHD/maps/ They also mentioned AURORA, the Nebraska/Virginia project (see http://etc.unl.edu/thomas.html, although I couldn’t find anything specific online.) They are looking for collaboration, and were or are part of the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure (http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm). Also check out ‘History Mosaic’.

They want information to develop to be a national, sweeping view from country to town to family detail. They want history in four dimensions – and to capture time across the web. They are also working on search with token X, word frequency.

They felt talent and time was often wasted on class assignments, and saw an opportunity to use teams of students (a temporary community classroom), to populate the data.
• 10 brief narratives, 1½ pages each.
• Students wanted an example.
• Load up the back end data – mark sites on maps, and highlights keywords for search capability.
• They have 3,000 data sources now.
• Students use each other and review each other’s work.
• There are 2500 cases for law from 1820 – 1900 to put in.

They envision history for your cell phone. Transformative center for digital history.

Editors are leading scholars. They have a former history editor from Encarta on staff.

Questions: Is the map a tool? Is it open source? (I’ve e-mailed these questions.)

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