getting started

In the fall of 2000, I taught Science and Popular Culture — a freshman-level general education course — for the first time. I knew of a few examples of graduate topics courses on this subject, but I was pretty much working from scratch to figure out how to pull this new field together for undergraduates. The huge holes that existed in the literature and the lack of accessible materials (due to their being outdated, overpriced, filled with off-putting specialist jargon, or out-of-print, etc.) led me to begin experimenting with preparing my own supplements, and presenting them via the web.

background
As I began to think of Science and Popular Culture as a web-enhanced class (a kind of hybrid entity — neither simply a traditional lecture class with recommended links nor a full-bore online course, but something different than both) I began to reconceptualize how to design and make use of what I was calling the scipop webfolio.

To add depth and breadth I began searching out and preparing textual and visual materials with a much more ambitious agenda, one akin to producing an edited text with accompanying analysis and commentary; I began studying the scholarship on computer-mediated communication in order to understand better the rhetoric of digital media, essentially adding in an interdisciplinary social science field to my intellectual preparation as a teacher; and I began to pursue a self-study course I'd put together on web design, which meant lots of after-hours grappling with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, CSS (not a lot of headway there, sigh!), and learning about the new tools for the collaborative creation of information and for sharing it (wikis, rss feeds, blogging, folksonomies, and so on). Because the webfolio that will eventually be published will now be much larger than I had originally envisioned five years ago, the demands I faced in working through putting the prototype together were much more challenging than my first trial-and-error efforts.

There is still much more that needs to be done on all these fronts, but it is time to begin moving from the preparation phase to the production phase, in order to get real-world feedback…hence the beginning of the rollout — finally! — for the webfolio in early 2009 (sigh...the ever-shifting deadline. Such is the lot of the associate professor!). I welcome any thoughts, comments, suggestions, and critiques you may have as the webfolio begins popping up page by page!

short-term & long-term goals
This prototype webfolio is designed to accommodate those new to the idea of science and popular culture, those with a deeper knowledge of certain topics and themes, and those interested in doing advanced research. The intent is to stimulate interest in this area, provide resources for teaching and research, and contribute to wider public discussions about issues related to science and popular culture (as a start on this, see the scipop blog, petri dish).

Ultimately, the three goals of the webfolio are: 1) to serve as an experiment in public history, becoming part of a larger conversation about science, culture, and history; 2) to bring resources to audiences which don't normally visit archives or have collections of materials at hand; 3) and to provide a space for a community of researchers, both within and outside of the academy, to work with and learn from each other.

One of the next steps will be to add in interactive opportunities, both for students and the general public and for the research community. I have lots of ideas on this score, but my first effort will be the creation of a database of memories of childhood experiences with science and nature. I've pilot-tested this project, and the next step here is to obtain approval from my institutions's IRB to launch the project. As with building in interactivity, building in collaborative opportunities for work projects large and small can work in many possible ways — the first effort here will most likely be setting up a reading circle on nineteenth-century children's science literature.

In the final analysis, the point will be not simply to transfer familiar forms of historical practice into static digital formats, but to explore new ways of thinking about and doing history. As Edward L. Ayers reflected in his 1999 essay, The Pasts and Futures of Digital History:

"New technology has not affected the books and articles that form the foundation of what we [historians] teach. Other parts of the academy have sustained long-running debates over the effect of electronic media on writing, but those discussions have bypassed the historical profession almost entirely. Discussions of epistemology, narrative, and audience that have animated literary studies have had no discernable impact on historians.

…The possibilities and obvious complications of those [digital] archives may create pressures toward, temptations toward, narratives that try to keep more facets of experience and perception in play. We might be able to imagine ways to write that let us deal more effectively with multiple sequences, multiple voices, multiple outcomes, multiple implications."

In short, Ayers, suggests, "a major goal of mature hypertextual history will be to embody complexity as well as to describe it…hypertext, in fact, could represent a new kind of rationality and empiricism." I have come to believe that Ayers is correct, and that the only way to see what may lie ahead is to dust off my dead reckoning skills and push off from shore.

thank yous
As a founding member of the Human-Technology Interaction Center (HTIC) here at OU, I've been fortunate to work with a number of talented interdisciplinary colleagues over the years (some still here, others not) on issues related to computer-mediated communication in particular and human-technology interaction in general. In starting out, cognitive psychologist Francis Durso was especially helpful in encouraging a humanist to join in the fun; our co-taught course on The Past and Future of Humans and Technology in 1997, along with a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences which provided for seven experts to give talks and meet with our seminar students, helped provide me with an education of my own as well.

As part of HTIC's summer NSF-sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, I also had the good fortune to supervise research — social scientific, historical, and philosophical — on human-technology interaction, and this too helped to spur my interest in not simply studying the digital world but of becoming a participant in it as well. My experiences with supervising these students' research projects and my own on-going web-based explorations led to my proposal to teach a course in the Department of History last year on the topic of history in the era of the internet: The Future of the Past: History in the Digital Age. As the students and I compared print history with digital history, and public history with academic history, I came to both a deeper understanding of history and new media and a much more tangible sense of how a digital community of inquiry can work, even if only temporarily. I owe these students a deep debt of gratitude for signing on to an experimental course!

I am also grateful for being chosen to participate in 2001 in one of the Echo Project's early workshops on digital archives in the history of science and technology, which helped to support my spadework on the childhood memories database project. OU's Information Technology Committee within the College of Arts and Sciences also has provided financial assistance in the early stages of building the webfolio, helping to provide basic hardware, software, and supplementary materials. Graduate student Natalie Peck was also of great assistance in helping me plan the early stages of this project.