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Ideas

This version was saved 13 years, 2 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Jez Nicholson
on January 10, 2011 at 4:05:57 pm
 

Historiography Hack

When you're an undergraduate, the majority of your essays require you to read around a particular issue, and essentially review/condense the opinions of other historians into an essay, comparing, contrasting, reviewing, and then adding in a little of your own flavour as well. We already have the established pattern of footnotes to provide references (links?) back to the original sources (primary/secondary). What I'm interested in is - what does a 'web-native' essay of this style look like? I don't think it's just a block of text with clickable footnotes (a la Wikipedia), but something a bit more - each argument/idea by a historian should have a URI, and the essay is essentially a Web of links between historians, ideas, events etc etc. So, history essay + linked data/semantic web = what? Something to explore.. (hack idea by Paul Rissen - http://www.r4isstatic.com)

 

BigDate Hack

The Javascript Date class (and in fact just about all temporal data on the web) is derived from the ISO8601 specification. This spec models the Gregorian calendar. This makes working with historical dates prior to 1582 (when the Papal Bull reformed the Julian calendar) complicated and error prone. I'd like to see an expanded Date class / library to simplify working with historical dates beyond the Gregorian calendar. Here's a couple of posts that explain the problem in a little more detail: http://www.computus.org/journal/?p=1721 and http://www.computus.org/journal/?p=1800 . UPDATE: thanks to @pigsonthewing for pointing me to EDTF http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/ Looks like there's some progress being made at last on historical dating. {Hack idea by John Dalziel @crashposition }

 

Plaquify

Connect with Facebook, download all the historic checkins of a user and their friends. Compare the lat/longs of their places with the Blue Plaque database, and show the user relevant Blue Plaques near where they've been recently. Perhaps display these on a map, or create a relevance score based on frequency of visits, proximity of FB Place to Blue Plaque location and recentness of visit.

Then, get offline access and use the FB realtime API to get updates whenever a user checks in somewhere. Compare each new checkin location with the Blue Plaques DB, and notify the user by SMS, FB message or email that they've just checked in near a Blue Plaque, and send them the synopsis of the Plaque - makes you look really cultured when you're out with your friends. (idea by @sicross)

 

Plaquathon

Take each Blue Plaque location, and turn it into an OpenGraph node using the Open Graph Protocol - build an app to allow a user to checkin to each Open Graph node using Facebook Places. Compete against other users, and your friends to visit as many Blue Plaque as possible. As well as game mechanics, each checkin publishes a stream story which educates a users friends on the Blue Plaque the've just checked into. And the world gets a tiny bit better. (idea by @sicross)

 

NovelContext

A old (ish) idea, take out-of-copyright books, in particular Victorian novels set in London, extract the real world places and people from them and link them to each other and to wikipedia/freebase. Thus being able to discover that Sherlock Holmes may have met Dorian Grey, or that speaker's corner features in dozens of novels. Creating the links that would have been there if the internet had existed when they were published. Additionally generating external links from historical sources to the books, eg from the newspaper reviews of the time to the books too. (hack idea by Gavin Bell gavinbell.com  @zzgavin )

 

History Viewer (on mobile)

A location based app that allows you to move through history and see/read how a place has developed.  Not a single image (as witht he London Museum one) but with more information, both text and images. More information http://blog.bibrik.com/archives/2009/10/augmented_reality_-_the_history_applicatio.html

 

Crowdsourced transcription of historical documents

The Old Weather project http://www.oldweather.org/ is crowdsourcing transcriptions of worldwide weather observations, and other events, recorded in ships logs made from the Royal Navy around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use the transcriptions to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

 

Old weather is a fantastic model for how crowdsourced transcription of data might work. How about an open-source toolkit that will allow me to make scans of documents available for transcription (in chunks) and which provides the slippy-map-style UI for reading text and an old-weather style interface for transcribing. It should also allow multiple transcriptions of the same chunk to ensure accuracy. [Hack idea by Matt Patterson @fidothe]

 

(Transcribe Bentham - http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/ - has a mediawiki plugin for this, that they have promised will be released under a FLOSS license. We should certainly nag them to get a move on and do so. There's also From The Page - http://beta.fromthepage.com/ - and CHNM are working on something as per this announcement: http://chnm.gmu.edu/news/neh-awards-a-digital-humanities-start-up-grant-to-chnm-for-crowdsourcing-transcription-tool/ John Levin, @anterotesis )

 

Pepys' theatre trips

Samuel Pepys went to the theatre quite a bit - e.g. he's seen the Tempest three times in two months - http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1667/11/07/ (the premiere of the Dryden version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_%28Dryden%29 ), http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1667/11/13/ and http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1667/12/12/ - and many others e.g. http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1667/09/05/ - and it'd be nice/interesting to in some way link that up with Theatricalia and get more historical theatre data. -- Matthew Somerville, @dracos

 

On This Day

There are quite a few sites offering an 'On this day' feature, listing historical events that occurred on a particular calendar day. For example, the BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday - and wikipedia has a similar category, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_31 This could be developed by:

1: Knocking up some code making it simple to deploy a personalized version

2: Listing and aggregating available APIs

(hack idea by John Levin @anterotesis)

 

Dates In Context

A rough idea from Jez (@jnicho02): Often, a date e.g. 1713 doesn't mean much to me. However, if you put it into a context like British monarchs ("the last year of Queen Anne") or historical events, it might have more meaning. I'm not asking for a full list of everything that may have happened in that year, just a single pertinent historical fact that I might know about already.

 

Of course, context is in the eye of the beholder and it would need to be localised, e.g. if you are French then you'd probably favour French kings of British monarchs.

 

 

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