To research the history of immigrants Erica Rand studies sexuality on Ellis Island, the gateway for many immigrants into the US. Rand studies sexuality, because the values about sex in our society influenced the history of immigration and immigrants. I think this is a very interesting approach, but in this blog I want to discuss […]
“Feminism and Museums” – a complicated subject, I thought. So I did what most people do when facing something unknown – I googled it. The first entry was, however, not the comforting Wikipedia page I had hoped for, but a call for papers for an academic book about the subject – more people trying to […]
More than twenty years ago I visited Ellis Island with the Dutch Museum Association. This visit made a huge impression on me, because it was the first time that I experienced oral history in such an intrusive manner. In the exhibition there were shots of interviews with survivors of the Holocaust. The orality […]
In 2006 Jeff Howe used the word ‘crowdsourcing’ for the first time in his article for the technology magazine WIRED entitled ‘the Rise of Crowdsurfing’. Ten years after Howe published his article, crowdsourcing has not only shown to be very useful, but also more and more common in our ever growing digital world. Through crowdsourcing projects such […]
Crowdsourcing: what about it? Crowdsourcing nowadays is a popular, widely applied phenomenon. Popular examples are Wikipedia, 99designs, and Kickstarter. There is plenty of online discussion about the functionality of this tool, stemming from a variety of online forums. Here you can find an extensive overview of the various ways in which crowdsourcing is applied and different […]
History is never unbiased and can become the centre of, sometimes, heated debate. Leslie Madsen-Brooks proves this point very clearly in her article ‘‘I nevertheless am a historian’: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers’. The increase of digital tools for people to do their own research has made it possible for everyone […]
Strolling through the aisles of the supermarket, semi-bronzed legs in shorts and my thoughts on the last week of summer. I stop to be embarrassingly pleased by the sight of pepernoten. This delicious treat appears earlier every year and so does the debate around Black Pete, the controversial right hand of Saint Nicolas, to whom […]
Wikipedia it is the largest platform for societal controversial content and also the sixth most trafficked website, that is exactly why Erik Borra together with other researchers choose this website as their experimental field. Their article ‘Contropedia – the analysis and visualisation of controversies in Wikipedia articles’ describes the on-going project Contropedia. In Wikipedia, Borra […]
“Reference works, like Wikipedia, often inherit the conflicts of the external world they seek to document and are being seized upon as exemplars of, and proxies in, those debates.” (J. Reagle) In 2014 Erik Borra, Esther Weltevrede and other researchers presented Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and offers insight into the development of […]
I’m a history-student so my mind immediately goes to museums, exhibitions and art-collections when I think of the word curator but this term is being used in a much broader context. It’s being used in fashion, the business world, the entertainment industry… In this digital age everyone curates their own lives online. “A new spin. Are DJs, rappers […]