Week 4: Writing, the Web, You

Historical Questions

Writing on the Web

• Accessibility
  • Users
  • Authors
• Permanence
  • E-mails
  • LOCKSS
• Crediting
  • Anonymous blogging
• Hyperlinks
  • Link Rot
  • Perma.cc
  • Permalinks
• Immediacy

Different kinds of Web-based writing

• Steven Olsen Smith's Walt Whitman edition
• Wikipedia page on Greenwich Village
• Dan Cohen's Blog
• ProfHacker Blog
• Writing History in the Digital Age online writing/review
• Writing comments

Tactics for Writing on the Web

• NYU Guide to web writing
• Appearance matters!
  • The Victorian Web
  • Trends go out of fashion

Is the book dead? Did the Web kill it?

In other words, historians and other humanists have abandoned the rigour of traditional scholarship. Provenance, edition, transcription, editorial practise, readership, authorship, reception – the things academics have traditionally queried in relation to books, are left unexplored in relation to the online text which now forms the basis of most published history.-Christopher Hitchcox

Your Web Presence

• Who do you find when you Google your own name?
• One stop shop for your content, regardless of where you work or go to school.
• Use blogging plugins to link profiles with your social media (automatic posts to twitter, linkedin, facebook, etc.)

Researching Greenwich Village History Blog

• Admin page
• Statistics
• Page Views
• Referral Sources

Testing Your Writing

• Testing readability of your writing
  • Explanations of Flesch-Kincaid Grade level readability results and Flesch Readbility results, Coleman Liau results, Automated Readability index results, Gunning Fog Index.
• Gender Guesser
• Plagiarism Checker
• Simplify writing with Hemingway app
• Test the Fitness of your Writing

Promotion Example

• Friends of MSPP page
• MS Research blog
• Samuel Pepys on Twitter
• Lincoln Papers
• NYPL twitter feed

Social Media Tools

• Facebook - How-to guide
• Twitter - How-to guide
• Reddit - How to guide
• Digg - How-to guide
• Stumbleupon - How-to guide
• Google + - How-to guide
• Pinterst - How-to guide
• Other methods?