So, there you have it. From a table of membership in different groups we have gotten a picture of a kind of social network between individuals, a sense of the degree of connection between organizations, and some strong hints of who the key players are in this world
The use of this kind of statistical analysis really helps viewers who are unfamiliar with this historical landscape build a better understanding how the social connections between individuals.
Digitized newspapers are inherently messy sources. They often resemble a jumbled bag of mistake-ridden words as much as neatly segmented columns of text. If historians insist on perfect data, however, we risk ignoring huge swathes of the digital archive. One goal of my project was to find a way to draw meaning from messy text.
Relevant with correlating to what we are doing this week and this course in collecting data and organizing it. Find it interesting that even old print newspaper could be so full of clutter and be unorganized such as the "click bait and junk" articles that pollute the internet today.
Retaining users was just as integral to the project’s success as recruiting them in the first place. It was therefore important to design a user-friendly interface which facilitated communication in order to keep users coming back to the site, and to develop a sense of community cohesion
Having a constant stream of activity and communication is key for a community like this. Also ensuing an interface that is usable by more people would assist. It is interesting to read how they have continued to gain collaborators and contributors as the project went on.
distinguishing between a "crowd" and a "community". Contributions made by a crowd, which Haythornthwaite describes as "lightweight peer production", tend to be anonymous, sporadic, and straightforward, whereas the engagement of a community, or "heavyweight peer production", is far more involved. A community of volunteers engaged in the latter requires, Haythornthwaite suggests, qualitative recognition, feedback, and a peer support system.
Just like kinda what we're doing in class, we are contributing towards a collaboration. Although the work itself is still our own.