A short article I wrote with Kerstin von der Krone about History of Knowledge, the first blog in the German Historical Institute Washington’s scholarly publishing program, is now open access. See “Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC,” in “Digital History,” ed. Simone Lässig, special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 47, no. 1 (2021): 163–74.
Cross-post from History of Knowledge In my initial academic encounters with Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the things that impressed me was the availability of… Read more Organizing and Communicating Historical Knowledge: Some Personal Observations →
We tried something new in connection with a conference called Learning by the Book. The conveners asked participants to submit a blog post to History of Knowledge in lieu of… Read more Blogging before Conferencing →
The following quote from an article about art education seems to have broader implications: “Early excitement for the Internet’s democratic potential has been replaced by a complicated marketplace of competing agendas of consumption, entertainment, social networking, and political action that continues to offer both opportunity and exclusion. Increased participation is coupled with a persistent digital divide, a gap in who has access to digital technologies and who does not, illustrating that ‘disparities in technology access and use are related to socioeconomic status, with income, educational level and race among the… Read more How Open is Open Access? →
I’ve been off RSS readers for a while, in part because of Google’s exit from the game, but also because of information overload. Thinking about using it again and revisiting some old stomping grounds in the blogosphere, I found Dan Cohen’s relevant comments on Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know. Seems I am in good company with my occasional ignoring of information—ignoring that I prefer to think won’t lead to, might even prevent, ignorance. I treat Twitter rather cavalierly too, as if it were a place to hang out, learn… Read more Information, Sociability, Reality Check →
If we pass around quotes on images without even a hint of the quotes’ origins, aren’t we part of the problem? #socialmediabehavior
Uploading one’s dissertation to the Internet Archive is certainly not for everybody, because publishers will not want to publish something that one can get elsewhere for free. Nonetheless, I took… Read more Dissertation on Internet Archive →
Here’s a satirical video about Wikipedia by CollegeHumor. Enjoy.
Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory has posted good material to his academic blog under the category, myth of black Confederates. Several recent posts include criticism of efforts by modern-day Confederate patriots and would-be historians who want to appropriate Weary Clyburn, a slave, as a defender of Southern liberty. In one he points out that writing good books to debunk myths is all well and good, but on the subject of black Confederates “the real fight must take place on the web.” In the same post he points to an… Read more Blogging and Myth-Busting →
This short piece appeared on this day on Blog Catalog’s blog. At the time the site was a hybrid blog portal–social networking site with an active community. Instead of reproducing the whole piece here, I link to the version saved on the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine for the sake of context. (June 2018) Too often I come across an interesting piece of information on a blog that does not contain links to the author’s sources. That’s too bad. All I can do at that point is shrug my shoulders and… Read more Do You Link to Your Sources? →
My wife is reading a crime story I got for Christmas and read over the holidays, Christian von Ditfurth, Mann ohne Makel. It’s sleuth, Josef Maria Stachelmann, is a historian… Read more When Google Gets it Wrong →