To Twitter or Not

Just when you thought it could not get any crazier, check out this article from the most recent Wired entitled   Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists. Is it me or is this merry-go-around called life in the 21st century getting faster and more weird by the week.

Alan

Story in Today’s NYT

Buried inthe back section of today’s NYT, more about the chap that Professor Cohen told us about running Five Thirty Eight.com and others of his ilk .

Political Polling Sites Are in a Race of Their Own

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/us/politics/28pollsite.html?ref=politics

Alan

Open Book comparisons

This was a very interesting project for me having never ever really spent time on either of these two databases. I supposed being somewhat of an old book person I went in with a certain amount of prejudice and reservation about what I expected to find. To my complete surprise I was genuinely impressed with what I found on both the Google Books site and Archive.org site. My biggest issues was finding the same book on both sites. I tried for Animal Farm and got several different versions on both sites. I also tried Winne the Pooh by A.A. Milne and ran into the same issue. I finally settled on another Orwell book Critical Essays published in 1946.

I think that just with all ‘new’ ways of looking at things the trick with this sites is simply playing around wioth all the differnet formats and styles and sizes until you settle on onw that you are comfortable with. On the both sites I like the idea of being able to bring it up to full screen and to see two pages at once. It also appears to be extremely easy to move backwards and forwards throughout a given book. My only downfall was that I did not watch which button I was clicking on and found myself more than once removed from the page I was reading and had to backtrack to find m position again.

Given that this is probably the wave of the future it will take some getting use to in the long run, although I fear my greatest obstacle to overcome is not the reading per se, it will be the increasing temptation to print the entire out and read it off of paper, thereby completely defeating the purpose of the set-up. I was impressed by the depth and breadth of both sites in the type of books that you could find and could easily find myself spending hours simply reading bits and pieces from any number of works that I think I should have read and have not.

Very interesting.

Alan

Interesting Talk Last Night

I thought that last night’s discussion about copyright was extremely interesting and I think we have only begun to scrap the surface of this issue and what the future holds for all of us. On that note I have included a link to a newly released RAND study entitled Embracing the Future – Embedding digital repositories in the University of London http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR625/ All RAND’s studies are always posted on their website for anyone to download for free. I thought it might be interesting to see how those ‘chaps’ on ‘the other side of the pond’ are dealing with some of the issues we have been discussing in recent weeks.

Also thanks to everyone who has sent me comments. I apologize for not getting back to everyone but as I was telling both Tracy and Tina last night for some strange reason I managed to mess up the system of replying and have had the hardest time trying to get the replies I have written to stick and go back to the intended recipient. Clearly the digital age retains the upper-hand on me at present but l’attack, toujours l’attack. More to come.

Alan

Proposed Digital Historical Resource

From Alan C.

1. In the early pages of Richard Wright’s seminal work Native Son, published in 1940, he has two of the main characters, Bigger and Gus, talking about what it must be like to fly, more specifically what it would be like if African-Americans were allowed to learn to fly. Within two years the first all African-American pursuit squadron – the 99thwas formed as an experiment by the US Army Air Corps with the officers to be drawn from the military program at Tuskegee in Alabama. For many people it is at this point that African-Americans enter the mainstream of aviation. What is less well-known, and the subject of this proposed Digital Historical Resource project, is the vibrant African-American civilian aviation community that existed during the inter-war years predominantly in Chicago and on the west coast that against great odds pushed to open up civilian aviation to African-Americans.

2. The project is needed to fill in a gap in the historical knowledge of both the African-American community during the inter-war years, to fill in a gap in the generic field of US aviation history and to fill a gap in the overall history of the United States during this time frame. Ironically, the name of Benjamin O Davis, the first African-American promoted to general office rank in the U.S. Army in 1940 is well known in the African-American community. Less well known outside of a tight-knit group of aviation history buffs but equally as key figures within the African-American community are people such as Eugene Bullard, Bessie Coleman and William Powell. Bullard was the first and only African-American to fly on the side of the Allies in World War One. He flew for the French and was denied the right to re-enter the US after the war. Bessie Coleman who learned to fly in 1922 in France and returned to the US to become the first civilian-licensed African-American female pilot. Powell, one of the first African-American civilian-licensed pilots, organized the first all African-American air show in Los Angeles on Labor Day 1931.

3. The main features will include separate web pages on all the key figures involved with African-American aviation to include suporters in the media such as Robert L. Vann and his Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most influential bloack-owned newspapers in the 1930s. Additionally, web links to other sites that tie into the topic of this proposed site, a search capacity, a historical bibliography/library and a photos page.

4. The web site would be designed to appeal to aviation history enthusiasts generally, the African-American community and those people with a general appreciation for US history or a specific timeframe, i.e the interwar years in the US. Aside from the historical aspect the site would also be designed to promote a greater understanding of the social and cultural issues confronting the US during this timeframefrom the standpoint of an overtly segregated society endeavoring to absorb the lessons of interaction with European society as a result of involvement in World War One. I am also conscious of the fact that aviaition holds a particular appeal for many children and would seek to include a specific children’s webpage.

5. While it would be great to include film footage of some of the main characters and some of the exploits it is doubtful whether any exist of sufficient quaility to be included. Added to which this would obviously be prejudicial to those viewers of the website who did not possess the technical capability to view video materials. From the standpoint of audio, I believe it would greatly enhance the site if any audio records could  be discovered featuring interviews with any of the key individuals or reporting on any of the key exploits. Once again it is doubtful that many, if any, exist. The press, particularly the African-American press and groups such as the NAACP do hold many photographic records and stories that would enhance the value of the site.

6. With regards to user-contributions, I would like to think that there are still some people alive that have memories of this period and with the aviation community. It would be of great value if once the website was launched there existed a capacity through which additional first-hand accounts, photographs and memorabilia could be displayed on the site.

What is Web 2.0 Article

Following the discussion in class Monday night about Web 2.0 I was interested to see if I could find a real basic comparison chart between 1.0 and 2.0 – for that segment of society that feels ’sorta kinda’ comfortable with technology but needs some basic pointers to help keep us on the straight and narrow and this most definitely would include me – I found this article by Tim O’Reilly entitled “What is Web 2.0″ I am sure for everyone that is far more knowledgeable on these matters than I am which would be just about everyone this is a real simple article but I liked the charts and graphs and his explanations and I thought it might be worthwhile posting it for everyone to take a look through.

Alan

Very Interesting Article in latest Scientific American

I read this article entitiled Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect our Future over the weekend in the latest issue of Scientific American. I can see that we are heading into some interesting waters over the next few years. Along with the article I would also recommend the latest Masterpiece Contemporary series that started running on PBS last night (Sunday). It is entitled The Last Enemy and deals with electronic surveillance in the UK post 9-11. This is a topic that is proving to be extremely contentious in the UK and is based around a supposedly fictitious system called Total Information Awareness (TIA) built around a very powerful database linked to all modes of surveillance. I know that our class does not delve into these areas but I think this show, produced in the UK, provides some intriguing insights into where people see the entire computer-based system heading in years to come. I would be interested to read other people’s comments about the concept.

Alan

Links for Semester Project

Like a complete pinhead I realized after reading everyone’s post about their proposed project I had forgotten to list a couple of links giving some idea of what I have found.

The first one is by a guy named Timothy Gaffney who has a website about aviation that includes a link to African-Americans in aviation but is is very basic, almost an after thought built on the Tuskegee history which is common on many aviation history websites. At least he does mention a couple of key figures.

Another link looks primarily at the role and history of African-Americans in the military as a whole but there is no reference back to the 1920s and 1930s from a civilian standpoint for obvious reasons, but it demonstrates how this pre-WWII period gets lost in most overviews.

This last one Negro Airmen International is extremely interesting and has a lot to offer, but once again concentrates largely on the Tuskegee period forward with only a short piece on pre-WWII.

Alan

Choice of Banner Heading

The illustration on the top of this blog reminds me of my favorite description of Great Britain by George Orwell, “Britain is a nation of long shadows on County cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and Old Maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.”

Actually I would dispute “warm beer,” despite what all my American colleagues tell me. I prefer to refer to it as “cellar temperature.”

Alan

Interesting New Book

A professor at Harvard Law School, Jonathan Zittrain, has just published a new book with Yale University press entitled The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It in which he argus that the Internet is moving towards a much more closed and “sterile” digital world. As you can imagine the backlash has been siginificant. An example being this article from Adam D. Thierer of the Manhattan Institute in New York. And so the debate goes on

Alan