Blog

Early last semester, we had a conversation in my Clio Wired 2 course about building websites to meet user needs, and the strategies to take to ensure our websites were usable. Most of our reading focused on strategies for building commercial websites, but unlike building websites for business, digital humanities projects have to walk a [...]

As some of you might guess, I get mixed reactions whenever I reveal that I use Wikipedia in my history classes. And not just for reading; I actually assign my students to research and write an article for Wikipedia. And it has consistently been one of my most successful assignments. It shows students the difference between fact-only writing and analytical writing, it provides an introduction to research methods, and it gives them more insight into the working of Wikipedia, so they understand why they should or shouldn’t use it for various circumstances.

Jeff McClurken’s recent post, “Writing a Strategic Plan for Academic Technologies and Libraries,” asks a really great question: If given the task of writing a strategic plan for a small institution, what would your top academic technology goals be? After teaching several undergraduate courses, and while currently teaching a graduate course, I’ve thought about my own goals at a classroom-level, and I think these goals could be applied to a broader strategic plan for a university.

The American Association for History and Computing has extended the deadline for its 2009 Annual Conference to March 2. The conference theme is “Frontiers in Digital History,” and its taking place at George Mason University April 3-5. Here’s the updated Call for Papers.

THATCamp, the immensely fun and popular digital humanities unconference hosted by CHNM is back in 2009. Its a true working weekend, where people show things their working on, get feedback, toss around ideas, and connect with others equally excited about the possibilities of digital humanities. If that sounds like your kind of event, keep reading.

Since speaking at the American Historical Association meeting last month about Teaching History in the Digital Age, I’ve thought a bit more about what my new roles are as an educator using technology and social media. I’ve come up with three that I think help me be a better teacher.

I spent a little time this weekend updating some plugins I’ve had in the hopper. First, Zac Gordon and I updated ScholarPress Courseware to work with WordPress 2.7. Many thanks to Zac for helping to update Courseware’s interface elements to match 2.7’s admin theme, and for adding an easy date picker to the schedule edit [...]

I promised Karin Dalziel some resources for doing web typography, and thought I’d just share it with a blog post. These are a few sites, blog posts, and articles I’ve found useful when learing about web typography; this is by no means a comprehensive list, and you’ll find that upon further exploration, there are plenty [...]

For those of you who haven’t heard the news on the Omeka blog or the Twitter feed, the Omeka team has released the stable version of 0.10, and in the process upgraded a few plugins and created some new ones.

The last part of these series briefly discusses some things I keep in mind when maintaining a site after launch, some things I document for anyone charged with adding and updating content on the site, and some good things to keep in mind with regard to user feedback