Mock-up

Here is my mock up. At this point, I’m unhappy with it and need to rethink a few things. The main things on which I need advice are the color scheme and the basic format—the menu at the bottom, the titles at the top, etc. On the color scheme, I am following the Hungarian flag. On the format, I want to try to keep the site’s pages the same size, to keep people from having to scroll down to see the entire page.

A few points to keep in mind as you look at the pages:

1) The “Contribute” page is empty, because I am still trying to figure out the annotation system. By the day of the presentation, some of the details should be ironed out.

2) Please ignore what I wrote in the “About” section. Actually, all of the text in the mock-up is tentative. Anyway, I am thinking about building a history of what happened in the town from the film, and, then, I will keep revising the history a bit like a Wikipedia page as I find new sources from my research there and from peoples’ annotations.

Background 2

Success!

Yesterday, I received an email from Hunnia Films that I can use the documentary for my project, as long as I tell them which clips I want to use, how long they will be, don’t use them for commercial purposes, and put a line on the site in reference to Hunnia Films.  Once I have given them the info about the clips, I will sign some paperwork, and I am ready to go. The upshot of this is that my project is going ahead.

The big, next step, therefore, is to choose the clips, which would be easier if I was just putting together an informal class project. With a contract, however, I need to be absolutely sure about the clips. Maybe I could renegotiate them later, but I would rather not worry about that. What I will do is go ahead with the class project as a first step. I am going to use two or three clips, depending on their size, to show the class the film and how I am going to present it. As I put the final together for this class, I will narrow down exactly what I want to use. I need everyone’s help for this, of course. I will post a few clip lists with the subject matter of each clip on the blog and get opinions. This morning, I started my own list of clips, which I am going to put into an excel spreadsheet. This Friday or early next week, I am going into the STAR lab in the Johnson Center and digitize the whole film, so I can be ready to split off clips.

When I watched the film today, I realized it is going to be difficult to limit the number of clips in the way I wanted. I noticed two new themes. One is small town people resisting the economic system the communist government forced on them. Many interviewees expressed anger over government officials taking their possessions. The other theme is the influence of psychology on political choices. One of the interviewees, who became an enthusiastic member of the communist party, talks about rich people laughing at him when he was young. Later, he became the “muscle” of the local party and used violence to threaten people into giving up their possessions. I would like to investigate these themes in the site, but that may be difficult if go by my original plan of only two clips per interviewee. I need to think about the project much more.

Mapping Plato

Over the weekend, it was very slow at work, so I played around with visualizing text along the lines of Moretti’s maps, and so I thought I’d post about it. Keeping with the Plato theme, I looked at the context of four dialogues and tried to create a map in Paint. In the end of this post, I will relate what I’ve done to authors who are more traditionally connected to history: Marx, Lenin, and other communists/socialists. First, I am going to give a quick summary of the context of each dialogue, and, then, there will be the “map” that I created. My prediction is comparing the descriptions and the map will show that sometimes a map is clearer than text.

The Republic: This dialogue begins with Socrates describing a conversation he had at the Piraeus, a port in Athens, the day before. The 251 pages that follow are his description of that conversation. That means that there is a one day difference between the speaker of the dialogue and the main action of the dialogue.

The Timaeus: This dialogue traditionally comes after The Republic. It begins with Socrates referring to his speech the day before, which is the speech of The Republic, and, then, other characters give their speeches. That means the main action of The Timaeus is a continuation of Socrates’ description from The Republic.

The Theaetetus: Two characters, Euclides and Terpsion, remember a conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus, a popular, gifted young man. Euclides was not at the conversation, but he did write down the details from Socrates. That means the main event of the dialogue, the conversation between Socrates and Theaetatus, comes to Euclides from Socrates.

The Sophist: This dialogue comes after The Theaetetus. That makes it a continuation of the conversation between Socrates and Theaetatus.

Now, compare these descriptions with the map below. As you can see, each the bubbles on the left contain the names of the dialogues, each with their own color. The lines lead to bubbles on the right. The furthest bubble to the right is the actual action of the dialogue, for example, the conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus is on the right.

 

Besides clarifying the context of the dialogues, the map reinforces an important point about Plato’s writing style. At least for the four dialogues, he places a few layers between his readers and the main conversations of his dialogues. That brings into question the accuracy of the speaker and the reader. Even an honest speaker can forget details from a conversation from the day before. The Theaetetus is ironic in this sense, then, because much of its conversation is about knowledge. I hear people say they know what Plato thought, but their access to the main activity of the dialogues is second- and even third-hand.

Mapping out texts like this, though in a more sophisticated way than mine, can reveal things about texts, their authors, and even the historical context in which the texts were written. What if someone mapped out the connections between Marx’s and Engles’ writings and every other communist that followed them, say, by mentioning their names and writings? What would that reveal about Lenin? Would that verify soviet propaganda that Lenin was following Marxism? I am convinced that such a map would reveal interesting things about the politics behind communist ideology. One could correlate events, like the success of the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks with communist writing in Russia. I imagine many lines of ideology stopping abruptly as their authors would disappear in the conflict with Lenin, Trotsky, etc.

I think it would be interesting to map the Bible and correlate that with Church history. I suspect that would reveal or emphasize patterns scholars do not always notice. Clearly, Moretti’s idea of mapping out texts is intriguing and useful.

Wordling Plato

This is part two of my last post. I want to experiment with some of Moretti’s ideas. Here, I am going to take a text from one author, put it through Wordle, and see what happens. I want to see the effect of taking the words out of context following this method. The book I choose is The Republic by Plato. I realize it may be a random choice for a history class, but I know the book, so I can judge what Wordle does. More importantly, all of The Republic is available online, so I can copy and paste it into Wordle.

I copied the book from Gutenberg.org from a link in Wikipedia. I pasted the whole thing, minus the commentary and legal disclaimers at the end, into Wordle and the image below came up.

I will begin with a few initial reactions. First, I would never use Wordle to summarize a text for me, as if I were to take the largest words in the word cloud to be the main points of the book. The main topic of The Republic is justice, which appears on the middle left. It is about half the size of the largest words, true, may, good, one, and yes.

Why, then, are true, may, good, one, and yes the largest words? The most interesting thing these words suggest is the importance of conversation in The Republic. After all, the book is just an extended conversation between Socrates and other characters. In this light, then, it makes sense that yes is a prominent word, because one of the hallmarks of Plato’s dialogues is people usually agree with Socrates. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but not so much in The Republic. At most for this book, people disagree with him at first, but he convinces them in the end.

What about the other words? I did a quick search in the text for each. True seems to come up most often in agreement—as in the following, typical line, “That is true, he replied”–rather than in conversations about what is truth. May seems to appear in conversation as part of a verb, as in the following line I found: “everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” One is similar to may in that it often is just the grammar of a sentence, as when someone says, “one may not have the will, or the other the power, to harm us.” It is also appears incidentally, in which case it is not the topic of the conversation. For example, characters often use it with examples to make their points: “do you admit that one man is a musician and another not a musician.” In that last example, one is not the topic of conversation, as if Socrates and his friends were talking about the number. Rather, one is used for the conversation.

Good is more complicated than those other words. There are references to goods—meaning items—good behavior, what is good, good and evil, goodness, the highest good, the term good, and responses, as when someone says in agreement, “very good.” The word good, then, is as used in conversation and is a topic of conversation. That still, I believe, does not take away my main point that the largest words in the word cloud have mostly to do with conversation rather than any particular topic.

Does this mean that Wordle in this case is useless for understanding The Republic? No. Though the word cloud is not useful for pinning down the main topics of the book, the cloud reminds readers that conversation is important. The latter point is something from my experience that is not usually mentioned about Plato. When people discuss him, they focus on his ideas like his vaunted Theory of Forms, not the way he conveys his ideas. One of my philosophy professors here at Mason liked to say that Papyrus is expensive, so everything in Plato, including conversational elements, are important. I think Wordle reinforces that point. Maybe the reason is that, as much as people want to pin Plato down on some point, he is more interested in how ideas form.

My final conclusion about Wordle is it can be a useful tool for examining texts, if used in the correct way. I could get more from a better application, of course, but at least Wordle is a start. Considering how important texts are for historians, historians need to use every method available for analysis.

Graphs, Maps, Trees, and “Great Books”

I am going to do two posts for today, because I don’t want to cram everything into one post.

Moretti’s book is great. I love the idea of being able to look at texts on a large scale and find new patterns. As I was reading, I kept thinking about those great books collections I see in libraries. What makes them great? What happened to other books of their time? If we knew about the other books, would we still consider the ones we’ve labeled “great books” still great?

I realize I am oversimplifying the issue here. First, many of the great books, which probably include Shakespeare, are just great works of literature, regardless of other books of their times. Hamlet is a great play and has beautiful language, regardless of the hundreds of other books that appeared in England at the same time. Second, I am sure that in many cases, such as with Homer, there just were not many other books floating aroun. Of course, Homer is a bad example there, because he was far before books. Nevertheless, it is intriguing how Moretti’s book points to ways of looking at texts that could overturn somewhat sacred cows like the “Great Books Library” or even greater sacred cows like “the cannon of western literature.”

Looking at this in another way, what about books today that have been published online? Which ones are going to be the “great books” of the future? I would assume that your everyday fan fiction about Star Trek or Star Wars would not qualify. One of the possibilities with literature online, probably all of which is born digital now, could be analyzed in the way Moretti analyzes novels. Future historians might look back to the first few decades of the web and see what interesting patters pop up with born digital literature, history, etc. They would find these patterns by looking at a huge collection of books, rather than from close reading of one or two. They will see patters that we do not see today. They also would be able to access their data much more easily than Moretti did with his 19th century novels.

In my next post, I am going to attempt to apply Moretti to some literature.

Offline Penumbras

The most interesting thing about this week’s readings for me is the offline penumbra in Patrick Leary’s article on the Victorians. Offline penumbra refers to a condition in which people become so accustomed to online searching that they forget about what is not on the internet; in effect, what is offline does not exist except for specialists (page 13). Leary mentions this about students in particular: “[o]ne result of the growing ubiquity of the online world that is already widely evident, particularly among our students, is a blindness to the limitations of the internet generally” (13). As I read the section on the offline penumbra, I began to realize that I was influenced by the blindness, too. This is a strange realization to me, because I have always surrounded myself by books (paper ones) and, outside of this class and searches of eBooks, I never read electronic texts for pleasure. When I was writing this post, I had a few small stacks of paper books on my right side from my classes. However, when I think back to some classes I took as an undergrad, I realize that I suffered from the offline penumbra syndrome.

As an undergrad, I was a philosophy major and obsessed with the ancient Greeks. I took classes on Plato, the Pre-Socratics, and even an independent study on Aristotle. I assumed, because I was surrounded by old, dusty, British translations in different libraries (some of the books had strong Victorian influences actually), that the internet was not creeping its way into my coursework. Now that I think back, however, I remember how much I used the Perseus Digital Library. I have wanted to post about that digital library, so here is my chance.

The great thing about the Perseus library is that it has all of those old philosophy books in the original Greek and in translation. All the text has hypertext links, which open up small windows with information about the meaning and frequency of the words, grammar, and so on. Please check out the site, but it can at times be painfully slow. There are also other non-philosophy, non-Greek texts on it, as well.

Once I discovered the Perseus library, I used it all the time (now and again these days, too). The problem is I now understand better the limits of the site. I do not know, for example, how accurate the transcriptions are. A bigger problem is that the site lulled me into thinking that I have direct access to the texts, and that leads me to ignore or be blind to the offline penumbra: the books in the library or even the originals on papyrus, vellum, parchment, or whatever. I probably will never see the originals, but I should not assume that what I see online is as good or better than the original copies. Maybe Perseus needs to add extra pages, if they have not already, of images of the available original texts.

Continuing with this idea of access to texts, the discussion of Holocaust testimonies in The Cultural Commonwealth report is interesting. I am intrigued by the possibilities of amassing thousands and thousands of documents. Professor Cohen has mentioned this in class a few times. I wonder what we could learn about the Holocaust by looking at so many testimonies. Beyond learning more about the Holocaust, we may be able to use the SHOAH Foundation’s collection to check Holocaust-deniers who claim that, because of the lack of evidence, we cannot say that there was genocide. Maybe we can take similarities between thousands of testimonies as evidence. The upshot of this for me is that I need both to be careful about what I assume about texts online and to be open to advantages of digital sources.

Digital Preservation

Unfortunately, I lost my notes about what questions and topics we need to cover in our blog posts this week, so I am going to comment mainly on what interested me in the readings.

Digitization in This Week’s Readings

Until this class, I never seriously thought about the future of what I created digitally. There was no need for me to think about it, because at most I had a few old papers. I saved them on floppies that are fast becoming obsolete. Now that I am contemplating a serious project online, my project on the documentary, I am thinking more seriously about preserving the site. This is especially important as there are probably only four copies of the film left. Soon, my VHS copy will start to deteriorate, if not already.

The most amazing/daunting thing for me in this week’s readings is the worry over loosing so much digital data. As both chapter seven of Digital History and Roy Rosenzweig’s article warn, a slight change or defection in a file can ruin the whole thing or accidentally pressing the wrong button can lead to the loss of hundreds, or even thousands, of documents. Furthermore, there is the problem of new software making old documents, files, images, and so forth too out of date to be usable. The irony there is that the urge to improve technology, which would lead to better means of recording history, is also a way through which we can lose history.

After I finished reading Rosenzweig’s article, I was wondering if anyone has bothered to put together a museum that preserves the most popular software and hardware from the last few decades. I am thinking about a place that maintains technology going back to even punch cards. I always assumed that IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and the other big companies would have kept some examples of their most important releases. I am probably wrong.

The interesting thing is that there are plenty of hobbyists (including my father) who still collect the old technology. For example, check out the CPU Shack, a site I just found from a quick search online. I suppose this means that I should think of something to do with the boxes of stuff my father has gathered over the years, if he decides to give them to me as an “inheritance.” I put “inheritance” in quotes because his menagerie is probably more of a curse than a boon. Maybe I will donate it all to someone who would do a better job of preserving it.

The other interesting thing in this week’s readings is the universal library about which Rosenzweig writes in his article. Apparently, some advocates, like Brewster Kahle, dream about a library that offers “universal access to all human knowledge” through a digital library. The curious thing is the example for this, the Library of Alexandria. When one refers to “all human knowledge” one should mean all knowledge: from what philosophers and mathematicians wrote, two areas no doubt strongly represented in Alexandria, to knowledge of farming, used by ordinary people in the ancient world but probably not well represented in Alexandria. To be fair, Kahle refers to the net as “the people’s medium: the good, the bad, and the ugly.” However, consider what archivists and conservators say about being choosy about what we need to preserve, a concern which I think is inevitable, the question is, then, would the digital Library of Alexandria really include the bad and the ugly. Regardless, it is certainly an interesting goal.

Digitizing my project

Though I lost the paper on which I wrote our topics for this class, I do remember Prof. Cohen wanted us to talk about the digitization of our projects. Well, I have thought about mine, and I realize I need to make more changes.

First, I realize that digitizing an entire film would require just too much space. Instead, I want to limit myself to a clip or two from each interviewee with commentary and links on those videos. I am thinking of an MPEG-2 format with probably at most 15 to 25 minutes of video. The total amount will depend on what I want to include from the film. I will watch it again in the next week or so and come to an initial total.

The side effect of limiting the total amount of video is to protect me from copyright issues. Last week’s class taught me that putting more effort into less video will give me more of a chance to fall under fair use.

I am not concerned about the quality of the video, because it is from VHS in the first place. I will settle for some of the more basic viewers mentioned in our readings this week. I am talking about QuickTime or Windows Media, for example, which I hope will limit the memory the clips eat up.

Copyright and My Project

This week’s readings have been very useful for me, because, as I metioned in class last time, copyright is my main problem for my project. What worries me the most is I am doing a film project, and film, it seems from the readings, is one of the more difficult media to reproduce without copyright issues. Fortuately, my film is not well known, and I have alternative plans in case I cannot use the film.

Let me present my findings so far. Magyar Stories, the documentary that will be the foundation of my project, seems to have been released in 1988 by a distributor named Hungarofilm. In the early 2000s, perhaps in 2004, Hungarofilm became a division of another company named Mafilm. I have the contact info for Hungarofilm, LTD sitting next to me, which unfortunately are only two phone numbers. Mafilm has its own website, but I could not find Magyar Stories on it. I need to seach more.

Alas, the bottom line is I still do not know the trail of ownership of the film. Verifying that means contacting Hungarofilm and Mafilm directly, which I am not ready to do yet. I need to learn more about copyrights both here in the states and in Hungary. My mother insists that my grandfather bought the rights to the film, but I think she may be confusing buying a copy of the film on VHS with having rights to the film. She also might be thinking of paying to have the film converted from a European VHS format to a US format. The one thing I have in my favor is we have an old friend in Hungary who is a lawyer and was good friends with my grandparents. I will probably contact him before I get in touch with anyone else. This week after class, I will start to prepare to find out about ownership rights. I better start sooner rather than later.

I have plans B and C, in case things fall through. My plan B is in case I can only use a part of the film. I will, then, focus on the revolution itself. I will post clips where the interviewees talk about what they did during the rebellion. There is more than enough material there to build a nice commentary on events.

Plan C is in case I cannot use any part of the film. I will then use the film as a spur to build a site dedicated to the revolution in Dunapataj. In this case, I could use the film, say, by having it shown in Dunapataj, so that locals could come and see and hear about what I am doing. My project would document what happened in the town and collect memories from locals.

My Project Outline

I will begin with a warning. I need to research and refine my project further. The ideas I have below are still tentative.

Abstract: My project, as I started to explain in my last post, will be a website dedicated to a documentary film entitled Dunanal or Magyar Stories, which is a collection of interviews that reconstruct the events of the 1956 Hungarian revolution in a small Hungarian town, Dunapataj. The interviews go beyond 1956 and recount the lives of the survivors until the time of the film in the 1980s. Because the film is only interviews in Hungarian with no narration, I will use new media to translate the film, fill out the story of what happened, and in the future add interactive elements, so that residents of Dunapataj and anyone affected by the revolution can share their experiences and connect with each other.

Need: Most basic is the need to preserve the film and make the interviews available for the public over the web. Moreover, the point of view of the film is unique. It is about the residents of a small town that rebelled against their local government. This is a different perspective from what one expects from big cities, major media outlets, the government, and even major centers of rebellion in the cities. Other websites on 1956 offer that latter perspective from high, while my site will offer the perspective from below, from the humble residents of a small town.

Main Features: The site will start as a platform to show the documentary over the web. Thus, I will make clips of the film—the size of which will depend on the technology I use and what I want to present—and transcripts in Hungarian and English available to visitors of the site. I also plan to include some basic information to fill out the story of the revolution to help visitors who do not know about Hungarian history, Dunapataj, or the interviewees.

Later, I will approach the residents of Dunapataj to show them the site and for help to find more sources. At least, I will take some photographs of places mentioned in the film and try to interview some of the residents for their memories. I will contact the head of the local museum, who is a friend of the family, for more help.

Finally, I want to incorporate interactive elements into the site. One possibility is to make it possible for the residents of Dunapataj, other Hungarians, and other groups (even Russians!) to share their stories of the revolution and life under communism and to connect with each other.

Audience: Starting most broadly, those interested in the revolution, communism, 20th century European history, and other topics relevant to the film; people who experienced the revolution and communism; and finally the residents of Dunapataj.

Technologies: At first the project will focus on web 1.0 technology. I need to develop a website, so that means using HTML and Dreamweaver. I need to find a way to host the film online. I am still not sure of file sizes, but it is possible to use third party sites, similar to YouTube, which let their users house large files. I will also need a digital camera and a scanner to digitize new sources such as old photographs, newspaper articles, and other documents.

Later, I will worry about web 2.0 elements. Though I have not researched this enough, I realize I will need an email address and some kind of forum to keep in touch with users and to collect their memories. I imagine Twitter and other social networking sites will be useful to get a larger audience and to gather more sources.

Eureka!

I have found my new project for class. I realize this is late, but I only discovered the documentary on Monday and have been racing around trying to figure out what to do with it. I am going to build a site around a documentary called Dunanal or Magyar Stories (search for a description here), as I have seen it translated in the few places that it pops up on the web. The film is a compilation of interviews with residents of Dunapataj, a small town in Hungary, about what happened there during the 1956 revolution through to the making of the film in the 1980s. What makes it so important for my family and me is that my grandparents are two of the interviewees.