human

When we spoke, I mentioned Nick Bax from the design consultancy, 'Human'. I'm thinking that he might be the guy to help us with the public display of our blog material and maybe also with the technology we use in the 'shrine' itself to give visitors access to music, text, and images. (Actually, I showed Jess some of his stuff and she's keen to involve him in thinking through the higher order issues as well - not how individual works are displayed but how to display explanatory text and so on.) Given all this, I thought you might like to look at his website. It's here:

http://www.humanstudio.com

break in transmission

I'm off to London for three nights over the Easter weekend, so won't be blogging again until the middle of next week. Actually, there's a big exhibition called 'Warriors of the Plains' on at the British Library at the moment. (There's a bit of information here.) So I'll try to see it if I can because I'm interested in how they'll have curated their Native American materials. At any rate, I'll try to keep the momentum going when I get back and we can have a chat before too long as well. Have a very happy Easter!

blogtastic!

Many congratulations on getting your river blog set up! I think it's a good idea to send everything you post there to this one but not vice versa. That feels the right kind of dynamic.

Mike Pidd - from our Humanities Research Institute - is currently building the site for the 'archive of exile' project, and I'm hoping that will be in place by the time we get together on July 17/18. There will also be a blog on that site but I think the best thing would be to select material from your river blog to post there and I can also put stuff up there as and when I want to. (We probably don't want quite as much posting there as on our other blogs because it should be balanced by stuff from Jess/Pam and Frances/Hannah. And perhaps also from 'friends' of the project, i.e. people you'll meet when you're over here in July.) I'm not sure how easy it will to post on the 'archive of exile' blog remotely but hopefully this will become clear fairly soon, so we can make appropriate plans.

Glad you like the idea of reading together! Yes, it would be good to put together an interesting selection of material. Perhaps shorter pieces and excerpts so that there's some variety as we go along? I'll open a folder and start putting things in it :o)

Zeemap

I like your idea of inserting notes into a map rather than just a document, so I've created a zeemap and embedded it in the right-hand column. (Click on 'visit larger zeemap' to see a version at a more useful scale.) I'm not sure if I've got the settings right, so you might want to mess around with it for a bit and then let me know how you got on. (Zeemap have developed a great resource but they really need to sort out their 'help' material!)

Google Doc

Over the next six weeks or so, I'd like to build up my knowledge of the history of migrancy in the area of the Mississippi River. (I think this is particularly important for me because, not being from the US, I'm starting from a lower level of general knowledge than you are.) To organise my reading, I've opened a document (called 'Mississippi Migrants') and am intending to type in brief reminders about particular migrant experiences as they come up in my reading and research.

Having made a start, I thought it would be good to share this with you and so I've uploaded it to Google Docs and, later today, you should receive an invitation from Google to become a co-editor of the document. I'll also put a link to it in the sidebar of this blog, so it becomes a satellite of the blog rather than something totally separate. As I say, I'm thinking of this as something I particularly need to do to organise my developing knowledge, so don't feel I'm pushing you to use it. On the other hand, if you'd like to add to it, I'd be delighted!

My plan is:

1. To give the material some structure by dividing it up state by state, moving south from Minnesota to Louisiana.

2. To give it still more structure by organising the material for each state in loosely chronological order.

3. To summarise the material into bullet points of not more than 3 or 4 lines so that it remains a kind of overview and doesn't become a huge sprawling essay.

So far I've just put in seven brief points that have caught my attention over the last couple of days. Will add more as I carry on reading :o)

two ways to make blog public

I'm writing in haste, so I'll keep this morning's posts short. But, yes, I think it might be good to open up the blog a little. There are two options really: (1) completely remove any restrictions on access, the only possible problem being that people might find it through google's search engine (although perhaps you can ask them not to include it?), or (2) keep it a private blog but give others access on an individual basis. I'm sort of erring towards (2) but don't have strong views either way. Any thoughts?

make blog public?

it occurs to me we could make this blog public and not publicize it particularly... this way we could send interested others here as we like... I don't have a problem with others reading what we've got going here, even though it's not really been set up for public consumption. what do you think?

Tags

I realised last night that I hadn't tagged any of my posts, which could turn into a problem if we put a lot of stuff up here. So...I've just been through and tagged all my stuff. (I've taken the liberty of putting tags on a couple of yours too.) They're all pretty basic, obvious labels, but I guess we can let our tagging develop naturally as we use the blog. The people in our media department tell me that's called 'letting a folksonomy emerge' :o) I'll tag this as 'blog' - for metaposts about the nature of the blog itself.

First post

Here's a home for Eve and Richard's thoughts about archive, exile, and voices. Now we just have to discipline ourselves to use it :o)