Doing History Online

       This class, we began by discussing the differences between HTML and XML. This introduced the idea of source code and how to view the source code in different boundaries. We also looked at scans of a letter dated from the Civil War. Mostly, though, we discussed the way that historians think and how it differs from other areas of academia, and the advantages and disadvantages of digital history.

       When historians think about the past, they do so differently than most of the general public. For instance, they are unconcerned with bias because they understand no history can be completely objective. Additionally, they tend to focus on a single period or moment so their studies can be immersive, for they hate to generalize. They also prefer complexity because they see history as multi-causal, and centered around humans. Lastly, they use narrative storytelling as a way to convey historical knowledge.

       For me, the historical thinking strategy that is most different and unfamiliar to me is the historian view of bias. Throughout high school, I was taught to investigate for any potential bias an author of a document may have had. Teachers time and time again told me that this bias was something to look  upon negatively, as a hindrance of the author’s ability to convey factual historical events. In the historian mindset, though, bias is an accepted part of history. An author’s bias is not seen as a weakness, but simply as one of the many points of view history can have. Like I mentioned before, history can never be completely objective. This idea was not introduced to me until I left high school, and it makes analyzing documents a lot more productive because it allows for the author’s point of view to become an other area of analysis instead of something to be worked around.

Getting Started: Concepts You Need To Know To Understand How The Internet Works

• IN 1957, timesharing, sharing the processing power of a computer with multiple users, made computing more feasible
• Military Network by Rand Network
• Packet-switching: files were divided into packets to send, then put together again for the receiver.
• Decentralized network architecture: if one node of the network went down, the whole system would not be shut down because it would not longer be centralized
• Cyclades: Inter-network communication, creating the idea of “internet”
• X.25: enabled communication through phone company servers for a monthly fee
• IMP (Interface Message Processor): In Arpanet, the computer that controlled network activities for a mainframe computer.
• Open System Interconnection: Standardize and layer the network in a standard layout
• Network Control protocol
• Server
• ISP: Internet Service Provider
• Personal Computers do not connect directly to the internet because they do not (typically) have their own servers; they are called clients because they are connected to the internet through ISP.
• Packets: pieces of a message that were broken down to send and then are put back together for the receiver to read.
• IP Adress: Unique code of each computing device that connects to a server
• Routers: direct packets around the internet
• The internet is a wire, and servers connected to the wire can communicate.

In class, we discussed the course agenda, going in-depth into the final project, which involves looking into the life of a civil war soldier. The first activity was to search the Professor online, and the second activity was to search ourself online; I was unable to find anything related to me on the first few pages when I googled myself, but like the professor says, each computer will have different Google results. This relates to the reading “Creating Your Web Presence” from the week one reading list. We were also introduced briefly to Zotero and Omeka, but only to say that we would be using them eventually.  We also watched two introductory videos about the internet that taught me, essentially, everything I now know about the internet.