Must We Associate Innovation With National Identity?
Are associations between nationalism and technological innovation useful?
Tag Archives: technology
“Universal Access to All Knowledge”: The Internet Archive, Google Books, and the Haithi Trust.
In this post, Ian Milligan introduces people to the Internet Archive, the Haithi Trust, and Google Books. Why should we have to travel to archival repositories, especially if they’re in an already convenient form like microfilm? Shouldn’t everybody have access to information, not just the select few who happen to have institutional affiliations? When it comes to access to information, we should be on an even playing field. Lay people interested in history, undergraduates, cash-strapped professional researchers, and all can benefit from several internet resources that put an incredible amount of information at your finger tips.
The Rise and Fall of Ideas: Having fun with Google N-Grams
We need to make sense of large quantities of information in order to do ‘big history’ and provide a context into which we can write our smaller studies. In this post, I’ll tell you what an ngram is, show some cool pictures, and hopefully drive you to have some fun with this.
Using Word Clouds to Quickly See the Political Past
This is a demonstration by Ian Milligan of how word clouds can be used to visually display textual documents, with possible applications in the educational field, media field, and elsewhere. It also has lots of pretty pictures.
Open Source Tools For Heritage Organizations
Heritage organizations are continuously working to establish a digital presence and integrate digital tools into their collection management practices. Open source software can be a huge benefit for an organization with a limited technology budget.
Twitter in the Classroom
This post discusses the potential uses of Twitter in the classroom, from the position of somebody who was once a skeptic.
Step by Step: Zotero
In this post, I’ll explain to students how to install Zotero on their home computers. As a teaching assistant, I’ve found this to be the most useful technological skill that I’ve taught undergraduates – many have confirmed this by noting how they now use it.
The Revolution Will Be Rubbernecked
While the recent protest movements in the Middle East reveal much about the present state of civic community among the people of those nations — Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt (and a growing list of others) — our reaction to them reveals more about ourselves than we should perhaps find flattering.
Laptops in the Classroom
Do laptops have a place in the lecture hall? An ongoing debate has raged over whether they do. I believe that we need to reframe our teaching approach as adult education and adapt to the use of technology.
The Historian’s Craft in the Information Age
A discussion of how information has fundamentally changed, questioning how this will affect the work of historians.