Moving the Past Foward
Ultimately, my previous posts all advocate that historians learn from and participate in the Semantic Web and in more open forms of scholarly publishing. Open Access publishing (OA) is gaining ground in numerous academic fields, thanks to changes in technology and in the mindsets of authors and publishers of academic work.
What is the Semantic Web? It’s essentially “a web of data” joined together by “ common formats” and coding to show how “data related to real world objects.” Tim Berners-Lee outlines the basic problem when he states that “one of the major obstacles” of the Web as “information space” is that “ most information on the Web is designed for human consumption” and not machine consumption. At present, a vast majority of electronic history scholarship, while freely accessible, are created for human-human consumption and not created with semantics in mind. My post on Semantic Markup and Microformats, for instance, addresses this issue in a specific way.
How, then, might the Semantic Web help with open access publishing? For me, the two work hand-in-hand. The Semantic Web is about making information meaningful and easier to find, while OA strives to give everyone access to the latest knowledge products. OA advocates the need to make scholarship more readily available to everyone. Semantics invariably aid in findability and usability. The Dublin Core Metadata intiative, for instance, “provides simple standards to facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information.” In the end, the Semantic Web helps to make OA possible.
Much of the work to provide semantic, open-access tools for academics is already underway. John Willinsky and others at the Public Knowledge Project provides Open Journal Systems. Open Journal Systems provides publishers with a open-source program to manage an electronic journal. Beyond scholarly pursuits, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses a flexible back-end that allows archivists to collect information from site visitors and uses Dublic Core metadata to organize and present archived objects. (See Sheila’s post, “Not the Same Old Archive”). I’m currently working on two projects that focus on scholarly and educational content management. Josh Greenberg and I are building what is tentatively called WordPress Courseware, a content management system for higher education courses that integrates blogging, dynamic syllabus and calendar creation, and bibliographic management into one package. I am also working on a simple platform to encourage academic self-publishing that combines blogging with the self-publication of articles. Both of these projects use the open-source, freely-available WordPress blogging system. Both also rest on the idea that our work as educators and researchers should be open and accessible.
The title of our presentation embodies the gist of my thoughts on digital history. We should move the past forward. We should be forward-thinkers about the past. It is no longer efficient put content on the web with the mentality that “if you build it, they will come.” We, as academics working for the public, should go to the public by making our work more usable in a variety of ways. We should enable our audiences to use our work in different contexts. Our work should adhere to web standards, semantics, and accessibity. Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, metadata standards, folksonomy, RSS involve thinking, not about how people can use information today, but how they can use it tomorrow and further into the future.