History 596 week 2 assignment

The introduction of the textbook starts by showing what people thought the digital revolution would unfold.  The authors discussed views both positive and negative.  The discussion then turned to the advantages and disadvantage of digital history.  I think that this was an important foundation for the text, because it in a way laid down the ground rules, or principle for doing digital history.  The first chapter begins with the origins of the internet and the early pioneers of digital history.  The next section describes early attempts to categorize history cites and describes why it is so difficult but important.  The rest of the chapter is spent going into detail about several categories.

I watched the interview of Anne Sarah Rubin. Both she and the writers in the article had a positive view of digital history.  In both cases they had broad definitions of the term. Rubin says that she thinks that digital history does the same kind of research as non-digital history and that the real difference is in how it is presented.  William Thomas in the article defines it as using new communication technologies to examine and present history.  The main difference seems to be that he Thomas puts more focus on how digital history effects the research process.  William Turkel goes a step farther to and states that ‘digital history makes use of sources in digital form.”

I enjoyed the Core Rules of Netiquette.  I have spent a good amount of time in various online discussion forums and have seen many examples of these rules being broken. 

I thought the article History, Digitized (and Abridged) brought up a point that not many people are talking about.  In the information age people are so over whelmed with the amount of information at hand that it seems like everything known to man must be online.  Because of this people don’t think about what is being left out.

EWU Historic District Tour

 The first half of this pamphlet is an in depth but to the point history of the early years of the college. It describes how the school burned down twice and how the school has almost been closed down several times because the state government has tried to stop funding it. Due in large parts to the efforts of William J. Sutton and Noah D. Showalter, two early leaders of the school, it managed to over come these difficulties. Even with these problems combined with nation wide problems like the great depression the school has managed to consistently expand and construct new buildings. The buildings in the historic district of the school have stylistic continuity because they were designed by one of two architects, Julius Zittel or George M. Rasque. I like this section because it is written in a concise manor that pacts a lot of information into a short space.

The second half of the pamphlet is a more detailed description of the nine stops. Each section starts of with a biography of the person who the building is named after if applicable. I likes these section because most of the buildings are named after people who had a large impact on the early years of the school, by learning about them we also learn about the history of the school. To some extent through the lives of these individual we can also learn about the history of education throughout the state and the country as a whole. This serves to put the historical narrative of the college into a larger context. Another thing that contributes to this is how people from all over the nation have had an impact here.

The other part of these sections describes the buildings themselves. These section goes into detail about the styles of the buildings. They also describes renovations that the buildings have under gone and how this has effected their historical integrity. Another detail that these sections cover is what functions the buildings have served over the years. Personally I don't care that much for the detailed description of the styles of the buildings but I recognize that it is necessary. However, I did find both the description of the renovations and the functions of the buildings to be informative.

Things I liked about this tour: I think that this tour contained a lot of information, that was, for the most part, well organized. It gives a lot of background so that you can better appreciate the information it gives you about the stops. One thing that I really didn't like about this tour was that the stops didn't appear to be in any particular order and we definitely not organized into a convenient walking rout. A more minor problem was that there was a bit of repetition between the background information and the stops and between the stops. Despite these issues I think that this tour was good over all.

Tour Proposal

My tour will be about the Centennial Trail and I intend to focus on the urban section of the trail.
My stops:
- Clock Tower - I might use this stop to talk about the history of Riverfront Park
- Centennial Sculpture
- Rotary Fountain
- Looff Carousel
- INB Performing Arts Center
- History of the trail
- I still need two more stops

I think that my best sources of information will be the Northwest Room in the Spokane Public Library and the archives at the MAC. I am not sure what sort of experts I will be able to find.