digital century

First online Digital History Assignment
Submitted the hard copy of the critique, links and bibliography tonight. Now for the blog post. Hope it is all in order and I have not made some glaring errors. Here goes:

Nines (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is an online historical resource for scholars of the 19^th century. [1] Its co-organisation 18^th Connect provides 18^th century literary and historical sources. [2] Both sites are funded by the Mellon Foundation; are maintained by Virgina University and have a shared index of resources. [3]

Nines accumulates data from other major online resources, and a subscription is required to access this. The focal points on its homepage are the Search Box, Featured Object, Browse Recent Tags and Recent News. There are links for information about the site and Peer Review; but these are not immediately obvious to the user. [4] This information would be better situated on the homepage along with the existing links to federated websites. The other homepage links could be listed on one side as they utilize a lot of space.

Metadata is needed for peer reviews which includes information about the author, title, date and source.[5] RDF (Resource Description Framework) is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) metadata model used in relation to this.[6] My 9s is another link on this page which allows scholars to tag items and share research online. [7] This creates an individual workspace enabling more searches. Nines is aimed at specialist scholars rather than other users who would need some awareness of nineteenth century topics.

Methodologies include two software collating tools: Collex and Juxta. Collex assembles exhibitory items. It controls Nines and provides interface design. [8] It allows researchers to collate and tag digital texts or images; facilitates browser compatibility and enables sharing of information. This includes primary and secondary sources. Juxta has various formats that analyse texts for scholars.[9] It consists of complex features and visualisations: histograms of results; a heat-map of text-variations and allocation of scripts to digital images. The newer Juxta versions support XML import files and provide default XML templates for tags. Juxta received a Google Digital Humanities Award: Nines intends to use this to develop Juxta further by linking it to Google Books.[10]

18^thConnect has developed a crowd-sourcing tool called Typewright which permits researchers to modify texts using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. [11] This site acknowledges that these texts are sometimes of inferior quality. 18^thConnect employs the same tools as Nines, but use their own distinctive style. The Nines site suggests that the extensive range of online tools could overwhelm scholars; and therefore proposes to update the ‘recommended tools’ section.

To summarise, the overall visual design on Nines has good accessibility to data via links to a wealth of primary sources: prints, letters and diaries. Secondary sources are provided by post-graduate students and other scholars. Software tools are part of the methodology that is relevant to these sources. However, most of the information about Nines software is obtained from links on the 18^th Connect site because the Nines’ links are not consistent. The majority of embedded links in the 18^th Connect text are not obvious unless a mouse is hovered over them. On both sites this could be improved by more drop box facilities, a brighter font colour and more underlining. There is extensive technical jargon which involves considerable research. The homepage could have more clarity by providing a summary of Nines’ facilities. General information about artefacts and museum collections could be made available to users other than scholars.

Word count (excluding footnotes): 543 words

[1] http://www.nines.org/ accessed 25.02.2012

[2] http://www.18thconnect.org/about/ accessed 26.02.2012

[3] http://www.mellon.org/ ; http://www.virginia.edu/ accessed 25.02.2012

[4] http://www.nines.org/about/peer-review/ accessed 25.02.2012

[5] http://www.nines.org/about/scholarship/peer-review/ accessed 25.02.2012

[6] http://www.nines.org/about/scholarship/submissions/ accessed 26.02.2012

[7] http://www.nines.org/my9s accessed 02.03.2012

[8] http://www.nines.org/about/software/ accessed 02.03.2012

[9] http://www.juxtasoftware.org/ accessed 02.03.2012

[10] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html accessed 03.03.2012

[11] http://www.18thconnect.org/typewright/documents accessed 03.03.2012