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Review No 2:

Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

First I have to admit that I am not using the Clio site for the blogs  I’m reviewing.

I got to looking and, well, you know how that is, so I hope that is ok.

I found this blog during a perusal of 

“100 Awesome Blogs for History Junkies” published by Best Colleges Online.

That said, this blog might not be construed as a history blog as it is a photo journaling of the unfolding fate of the legendary Hotel Chelsea, home to a dizzying parade of 19^th and 20^th century artists, musicians, poets, authors, …you name it.

I was ignorant of this monument to human angst and creativity until I was actually upon the building on my second visit ever to New York just a few years ago and its haunting story inevitably captured my heart and imagination.

What intrigues me about this rather amateurish blog is the wonderful raw content of the photographs, which makes it a treasure trove of that irresistible stuff, “primary evidence”. 

In many ways the most enduring kind of history blog is one which is unique, and a photo journaling of any event is going to be just that.  Not everyone has access to this building and especially not at this particular time in its history, and to keep a visual record of its renovation is to create a digital archive that really might endure.

more to come.....

Unlike the first blog I reviewed, this blog is rather raw, but I like that style in this case.  It is genuine, gusty and unpretentious.  The author, Ed Hamilton, uses the blog as a "repository of history, lore, and memoir" NYT, Dec 19, 2006 .  He began it in 2006 after a fire incident in the hotel corralled its inhabitants and created the scenario for shared stories.  He keeps a running list of links to literary references, news reports, articles, and just about anything else that refers to the hotel.  This runs down the left side of his blog

providing a rich archive of the hotel's illustrious past.  earlier posts mix photographs with good explanatory texts and I for one would have liked to have seen this continue, though yet again I applaud the consistency of the photos which can capture so much more than words.

And.....now I know how to make a screen shot on my Mac that selects a particular area....thank you class!

But Can You Make Your Way Back?

But Can You Make Your Way Back?

One of the hazards of the web has to be the retracing of steps to locate again that significant information that has just now eluded you.  In the short term the chore is relatively easy.  Over the long term, however, broken URL’s, unsupported sites and web migrations leave the user with a feeling akin to Pooh and Piglet as they follow their own footsteps round and round a spinney in the 100 acre wood.  Confusion and loss.

The dichotomy of scarcity or abundance in the digital archive of the future has been hotly debated.  Though perhaps most recent scholarship sees the cup full, many of the web’s customers have been confounded by the “here today gone tomorrow” vagary of the medium.[1]  Fragility, dependence on ever evolving applications that become obsolete apparently over night, or mere human error, can wipe out whole swathes of data in a heartbeat.  Many have experienced that moment of “here now and oops gone” on their own PC’s and countless hard drives have succumbed to dereliction or lightening strikes.  Virtual after all is, “virtual”.  Therefore, despite predictions of an over abundance of digital records as they proliferate across the world’s computer networks, preserving the content of our digital universe in any kind of order is an ongoing task of apparently monumental proportions. 

What a delight then it is to find the “Way Back Machine” whose purpose is to retrieve sample web sites in their various enhancements over their life spans from a growing Internet Archive.[2]  Indeed the Internet Archive site itself embodies some of the most unique and brilliant features of the digital universe.   Since 1996 an unimaginable 150 billion web pages have been archived and organized for retrieval using the Way Back Machine digital tool.  The searcher can effortlessly pull up the pages in a variety of ways to closely observe change over time.  (I notice that the web site is currently in Beta and I wonder what the new version will bring?)

Subjecting a web site to the “Way Back Machine” is in itself an adventure in digital history as it illustrates not only the history of the evolving organization that is responsible for its contents, but also the history of the Internet itself with its growing levels of sophistication.  

I decided to load up into the machine a history web site called “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey” .  The first of the 324 home pages that have been captured by “Way Back” is dated Feb 13^th 2003 and is a pre-launch start with a simple design in mainly black on an aged  linen paper background.  Although it makes use of some illustration the page is text heavy and similar to a page in a book or magazine, using mostly horizontal space.  Though it is just an announcement of things to come it does establish style elements of the web site for the next four years.  Colors are limited but pleasant on the eye, business is up front and clarity underpins the layout.  Navigation aids are clearly listed in a long left side bar and some major elements such as search tools are repeated in the main body of the page.  A comparison between the first and last version of this home page before it morphed in 2008 reveals little change except the addition of new information such as “Copyright Information and Citation Guide” in the navigation bar, new links to information about the project as it becomes more far reaching and of course the addition of increasing numbers of documents that can be searched.  Historical background information migrates almost unchanged in fact and this continues up to the present 7^th version of the web site.  No need to re-make the wheel after all!

The site’s 5^th version can be viewed for May 9^th, 2008 and reveals a very polished and professional overhaul that endures to this day.  This suggests both the growing variety of options available to web designers and a likely infusion of resources to make it happen.  The baby is not thrown out, however.  Underpinnings of content and familiar devices such as the highlighted, “On This Day In…..” are maintained in the new look.  Even Hogarth’s familiar old wigged barristers are kept in to oversee proceedings, though now it is possible to notice their delinquency and get the humor of the scene (take a look at them at the bottom of home page).  The new home entry page creates a fuller story of the site with its colorful banner underlining the adage that a picture paints a thousand words.  The old linen background has been replaced by basic white, allowing text to be smaller and tighter and creating more definition for the various highlighted boxes of information on the page.  The page now makes more use of vertical space, being divided into three columns and keeping the information in the center for ease of reading and the “business” to the sides.  Navigation aids are listed both along the side as previously and across the top, which seems to have become the new convention for web sites.  Since searching is probably the most important part of the web site for the user this now has its own clearly demarked box which simply distills a search to two options, though other options are available.  Complexities still exist, but are relegated to deeper pages that can be quickly retrieved.

Let’s see……what dreadful thing happened on this day (Sept 11^th) in 1734? 

Mary Eager, Killing

I guess it would be a lot to ask for the URL to be more self explanatory?

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[1] John Unsworth, dean of University of Illinois’’ Library School, quoted in Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians http://www.livescience.com/10746-digital-age-presents-problems-historians.html; Roy Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance, Preserving the Past in a Digital Era

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.3/rosenzweig.html

[2] It is interesting to see that it has a counterpart created at the New Library of Alexandria in Egypt.  Collaboration is what it’s all about!  http://archive.bibalex.org,

"Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, Blog......"

“Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, Blog………….”

I had not imagined myself writing a blog.  The “hows” and the “whys” presented seemingly impossible obstacles, even if the motivation had been strong.  The barriers of personal and private seemed reason enough to leave well alone,…..and, what did I have to say anyway?

Now my feet are wet I see it’s not so daunting, and one of the unexpected benefits has been the urge to explore the landscape of the “blogosphere” while I’m out here.

In 2011 there were estimated to be 156 million public blogs

I know it's Wikipedia, but for this I trust it

Once the convention of the journal and the social forum took digital shape in the early to mid 1990’s it was just a matter of time before the blog emerged as a dot com bonus.  Whoever the pioneers were, the genre had a name before the end of the millennium.  “Weblog was coined in late 1997 by Jorn Barger and jokingly divided into “we blog” within two years by programmer Peter Merholtz.  (No matter that it sounds awfully similar to “bog” with the implications that word has in the “English”
English language!....you can look that one up.)

For a time line of the unfolding history of the blog I found this site very handy, 

New York News and Features

Since that recent and oh so long ago time, the blog has matured and mushroomed to embrace its own kingdom on the World Wide Web, morphing in new and imaginative ways and spinning off its own concepts and players, expressed in its own vernacular, “blogdex”, blogrolls, Blogscope, vlog, Phlog, moblog, MyBlogLog….the list is endless. 

Just as a blog can be seen as a small web site, Twitter is a small blog

The History Web Blog:

It seems that if most serious academic historians have kept a conservative relationship with the Web as Cohen and Rosenzweig note, many have been drawn by the attraction of the blog with its informality and friendly simplicity.  Traditional conventions can slide, wide ranging topics can be explored and ideas can be freely wielded.  It’s fun!   

In my “internet diving” for fascinating history blogs I came across an interesting web site dedicated to the topic called  "The History Blogging Project".

In early 2011 The Universities of Oxford and Roehampton collaborated with The Institute of Historical Research at the University of London to explore the potentials of bogging for postgraduate history students.  The result is a sort of group blog site that discusses the issues involved.  From here I somehow Googled my way to one of the history blogs that got my attention:

Review No 1: 

"The History Blog"

Here “Livius”, aka Roman historian  "Livy", promises “not to suck” and gives no other modern identification.  In contrast to “sucking” there are many things about the blog that I greatly admire. 

• From a design angle it manages to pull off both intrigue and clarity, something that I can now appreciate as I paraded all the Blogger templates around my own word offerings, finding them all to be lacking in some feature.  “The History Blog” utilizes an attractive aged page template that creates an atmosphere of antiquity.  Though many articles are from the modern period, this background nicely unites the wide-ranging topics.  Another unity is achieved by the intriguing nature of the stories that are chosen. 
• The font looks like Times New Roman, (very appropriate) and the text is kept simple and is interspersed with well sized thumbnail photographs and other illustrations which can be pulled up in all their graphic glory should the user desire.  In long articles some print is also inset to create variety and help the reader “bookmark” areas of the page for ease of use.  The author is not afraid of length, fully fleshing out his engaging human stories in an informal but informative style.  He uses hypertext sparingly but to great effect, as you’ll see when you  Scroll down to "she's almost done" well down on the linked page.
• Other considerations of aesthetics and usability include the attractive banner and simple choice of color which, along with the page template, bear witness to all entries in order to create a pleasing unity; and the clearly demarked but low key navigation aids.  The latter includes a nicely hierarchical list with business first, handy topics next, an easy to find SEARCH box and the archive directory to follow.  These all span a slice of the left side of the “page”, leaving the text with a good margin of space so that the site is not cluttered or confusing.  Looking at the list suggests that this is an enduring blog.
• The success of this blog is not achieved by the author alone, and I admire that he or she gives up-front credit and public praise to the web guru, technician and artist who gave form to the authors desires.  Would that we were all so fortunate! History Blog, Thanks and Praise

More soon.....and this is still working on week 1!