Wikipedia: How History is Meant to Work

I will be the first to admit that if I want knowledge about a particular event in history, Wikipedia is the first place I look. I often find myself looking to Wikipedia to expand on or clarify some question I may have about a historical event. I was recently watching The Perfect Storm on TV, and wanted to read a bit more about the event, and clarify a few things I saw in the movie. Wikipedia is convenient, easily accessible, and I believe most of it is accurate. In college, we are all warned about using Wikipedia, especially when writing a paper, or conducting research. I would never cite Wikipedia as a source of information 1) because it is hard to tell where exactly the information came from, and 2) I would not be 100 percent sure the information was accurate. However, if you think about it....how do we know that anything is 100 percent accurate unless we witnessed it ourselves. History is constantly changing, and being reviewed and revised by people who have discovered some new piece of the puzzle. In the Sheets article, he mentions a book titled, Telling the Truth About History. I had to read this book in a Historical Methods class at ETSU. I actually enjoyed the book, because it helped me understand a bit more about how we write about history, and how it is a collaborative effort. I think history is a story told from many different perspectives, and we have to keep that in mind we we view Wikipedia, or any other source from that matter. I believe Wikipedia can be very useful in the social studies classroom, and I think it should be used to help students understand how historians go about writing the histories that we are reading in our history classes. There are some downfalls to using Wikipedia for information, for example, Rosenzweig warns that Wikipedia is open source, and information can be added or deleted by anyone. This can be very problematic, and could provide completely false information. However, one positive aspect of this is that it becomes a collaborative effort. Many different people can come in and add or edit information to provide a more accurate telling of the story. Wikipedia allows students to easily explore an interest, and it also provides references for further exploring. It can also point students to other related events or people, and it can really help students gain a full understanding of an event. Ryle and Snowdon's article, I believe, gives Wikipedia credit for helping students understand the "how" and not just the "that". It allows students to see how historians go about compiling information, and forming their research into a coherent story. It allows the to see how they get to the "that". I think knowledge is more than just facts, I believe it is how we organize those facts to understand the deeper meaning of an event. Knowledge is the "how" that comes from the "that". Meaning knowledge is how we organize all of the information in a way that we can recall this information and apply it to different situations.

My policy on using wikipedia in the classroom will be this: only use wikipedia as a means of located other sources of information, and never directly cite wikipedia as a source in any work. I think wikipedia can serve as a good stepping stone to other, better sources of information, such as newspaper articles or government documents. However, I think that it is too dangerous to allow students to use wikipedia as a source for any paper or project. Not to mention, I think it will do them a disservice when they reach the college level and are told never to use wikipedia as a source. I do, however, think that wikipedia can be a good way to show students how collaboration in history works. Much of the history we know has been edited and added to over time. New information is discovered, theories are overturned, and facts are further supported. A creative way to use wikipedia in the classroom would be to have students work together on a paper, or project and have students proofread and edit each others work. First, I would provide the students with some background information on wikipedia and how it works, as well as give them the specifics of how I want them to collaborate on their assignment. I will specify how many times the work should be edited by other group members, and how to address areas of disagreement. I think this will be a good way to teach students to collaborate, as well as give them a taste of what other historians do everyday. I think as part of the assignment I would also have them describe their process and their feelings on collaborating, such as what was easy or what was difficult about it. I think this will really get them to think more critically about where they get information, and will cause them to look more critically at open-source information, such as wikipedia.

Beautiful Data

I've never really thought about data being beautiful, but when I think about charts, graphs, or other representations of data I think about what aspects of these representations caught my attention and why. After reading more about what makes data beautiful, it makes sense that it is not just about the colors, its about how the information is represented. The visual must speak the "language of the eye" and the "language of the mind" simultaneously, as suggested by David McCandless. It is important to represent the data in a way that is easily understood, and provides all the necessary information. However, it should be visually appealing. As Noah Lliinsky suggests, data "must be aesthetically pleasing, yes, but it must also be novel, informative, and efficient." Beautiful data should possess all of these qualities. It should be innovative, and should attempt to convey information in a new way. He uses the periodic table and the map of the London Underground as examples of data having these components. Data should also be informative. If the data has no purpose their is not point in displaying it. And it should also be efficient, and easy to understand. A good example of beautiful data is the Geograph project underway in Great Britain and Ireland. The way the data is represented is beautiful, novel, informative, and efficient. The maps they are creating are packed with a great deal of information about the geography throughout Great Britain, and the geography can be seen and not just described. The pictures that are being collected for this project are beautiful, but they are also informative.
Matthias Shapiro believes that data should tell a story, which begins with answering a single question that you will answer through data. He informs the reader of the step by step process to creating a visualization. There have been many changes that have taken place in the field of data visualization through the years, but the purpose of organizing and representing data has always been.
Visualizations serve a great purpose: to inform. However, as we read in the Dragga and Voss essay, sometimes the viewer can be manipulated and mislead. It is important to look at data representations with a critical eye, so that we are in control of the information we absorb and are able to analyze it in a way that presents the truth.

As far a using data visualizations in the classroom, I think it is a great way to get them to think more critically about the information they take in. You can teach them to ask questions about visuals, and look at them with a critical eye. In history, it is a little harder I think to use visuals in the classroom, and since data representation is not our focus as history teachers, I think we have to be very careful how much time we spend on such a topic. I think it would be a good idea to have them analyze some visual representation in their textbook at the beginning of the semester. I think this would go well with teaching them how to use the textbook, and how to take information from it. I think you could let them choose any visual in the text book, and have them analyze it based on Lliinsky's 4 components of a good visual. I think this would be a quick assignment, but would also be very informative and engaging.

Are images invisible?

I am a very photographic learner, so seeing images helps me understand more about the written word and helps me make deeper connections to the material. At the same time, it makes sense that sometimes visuals can be invisible to the learner. The Burke article suggested that, “historians do not take the evidence of images seriously”. I thought this was strange, but when I thought about it you rarely see visuals alone to describe history. Images are usually accompanied by words that tell the story, and the images are just used as representations or depictions to support what is written. We rarely let the images tell the story themselves. Images have served important roles in telling the stories of the past since before the Renaissance. Back then images often told stories by themselves. A person could gain an understanding of a battle by looking at a series of images, but somehow images have become less important as prose has risen in prominence. “As one historian puts it, historians prefer to deal with texts or political and economic facts, not the deeper levels of experience that images probe.” Images can serve as a form of evidence to back up written word, and that is what we see now. There are many types of visuals that can tell stories of the past. Painters could also be considered historians. The history these kinds of artists usually represented was that of national history. They would paint images of war victories. A single image, to a series of images, then a strip narrative can tell the story of what did happen, or in many cases what should have happened. Many images of the past were used a propaganda. The Bayeux Tapestry is an important example of a strip narrative and explains a great deal about the Norman Conquest in England. Even still, the images must be placed in their proper context, and it is necessary to understand who created the images and where. The Werner article encourages teachers to use the images in textbooks as a way to teach their students about the past, not just to “lighten the word” or support the story.
Using images, and allowing students to draw on their own interpretations of the images enables helps achieve the goal of depth of knowledge and higher order thinking, not just the learning of facts. Students must know that they have the authority and capacity to assess the meaning of an image.In the Staley article, Edward Tufte calls images that are meant to convey information, “cognitive art.” Images in books like The Rise of the West are meant to be cognitive art. Staley believes that cognitive art and information images, such as maps, are a serious form of representation in history. Staley suggests that images can accomplish things that written prose can’t. They can depict dimensionality and structures when prose cannot always accurately describe these things.

Looking at ways to use visuals in the classroom, I think as assignment similar to one we just did would be very beneficial and a wonderful and engaging learning experience. I thought that it would be really good to do a visual assignment in a US History class when I would be teaching about the 1960's. There are so many defining images of that era, and visuals can say so much about the changing times that American's faced. I would assign a project in which my students had to find an image representing some part of the 1960's, and they would analyze the image, as well as provide contextual information, and present the image and their research to the class. I think this would be a very interesting assignment, it would be brief, but would convey a lot of information in a little bit of time. I really may keep this idea in mind when teaching about the 1960's.