I enjoyed the first season of the Serial podcast. It brought in a lot of important topics, from islamophobia to the frailties in our justice system. But a journalist friend of mine clued me in to the idea that Serial is, at heart, a show about journalism: it’s a reporter’s winding, uncertain route through a…
Online publishing has pushed though a whole forest of weird snares, and one of the most persistent has been copyright. From Google Books to Napster to academic publishing, the legalities of intellectual property have slowed fast-rushing online initiatives to a crawl. Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig call copyright “an ever-evolving set of principles” that must…
Laura Bliss’ “The modern beauty of 19th-century data visualizations” demonstrates that our ideas about visualization aren’t new. For all a flashy venn diagram might impress us, most of our methods for putting data into charts are at least a century old. I remember reading Susan Schulten’s book Mapping the Nation last year, and realizing that…
(Map pin at Daisy, WA, about 15 miles south of Kettle Falls.) In 1908, Kettle Falls had 99 problems, but a ditch wasn’t one. Part of the landscape that lies under lake Roosevelt today is a series of “benchlands,” flat regions separated by steep drops. The volcanic soil is fertile and the nearby Columbia river…
In a 2008 article, John Herbert and Karen Estlund wrote that newspaper digitization was “exploding” 1 As leaders of the Utah Digital Newspapers project, they’re probably the right people to ask. The project was a poster child for digitization and open access for years, snapping up grant funding and positive press. Even if it was…
Today, most of Fort Spokane is bare foundations. But in the shade of the ponderosas on the western edge of the site, a few of the orchard’s original apple trees have held their ground for more than a century. The orchard was planted in 1902, in the early days of the boarding school. One of…
Until president Cleveland, presidential papers had been just that: papers. But while studying the primary documents that the president and his closest associates had produced, Allan Nevins came to an important conclusion: the telephone was changing the way even presidents lived and communicated. Nevins wasn’t the first to conduct oral interviews to strengthen the written…
For as fast-moving as the digital humanities is supposed to be, Tim Sherratt’s 2011 article It’s All About the Stuff still seems to perfectly capture the state of its opportunities. New technologies for searching, he says, can “turn archives on their heads” by freeing the content of archives from the rigid hierarchies that finding aids impose on them….
My classmates in #EWUHist544 and I are discussing the content that’s already on SpokaneHistorical.org for the Fort Spokane area. Eryn Baumgart’s blog has a thorough discussion of what’s there, and Adrienne Sadlo makes an important critique of the tone of some of the existing content. Josh Van Veldhuizen found some specific mis-interpretations in a story about officers’ housing, too, and I’m…
When Stuart Chalfort testified in a 1951 court case about Spokane lands, the tribe’s attorneys said it was “difficult to imagine on what basis defendant fathoms its contention” that Chalfort was an expert. He’d only interviewed two Spokanes, went the testimony, and one of them wasn’t considered an expert on the topic himself. (297) It’s an exchange that…
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