It’s time to subscribe to the blog of CHNM’s Creative Lead, Jeremy Boggs, if you haven’t done so already. Jeremy is ramping up for what promises to be a very important blog series on how to create and execute a digital humanities project, from conception to design to coding to maintenance.

Since its name was coined on February 18, 2005, AJAX (for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has been a much-discussed new web technology. For those not involved in web production, essentially AJAX is a method for dynamically changing parts of a web page without reloading the entire thing; like other dynamic technologies such as Flash, it makes the web browser seem more like a desktop application than a passive window for reading documents. Unlike Flash, however, AJAX applications have generally focused less on interactive graphics (and the often cartoony elements that are now associated with Flash) and more on advanced presentation of text and data, making it attractive to those in academia, libraries, and museums. It’s easy to imagine, for instance, an AJAX-based online library catalog that would allow for an easy refinement of a book search (reordering or adding new possibilities) without a new query submission for each iteration. Despite such promise, or perhaps because of the natural lag between commercial and noncommercial implementations of web technologies, AJAX has not been widely used in academia. That’s fine. Unlike the dot-coms, we should first be asking: What are appropriate uses for AJAX?

As with all technologies, it’s important that AJAX be used in a way that advances the pedagogical, archival, or analytical goals of a project, and with a recognition of its advantages and disadvantages. Such sober assessment is often difficult, however, in the face of hype. Let me put one prick in the AJAX bubble, though, which can help us orient the technology properly: AJAX often scrubs away useful URLs—the critical web addresses students, teachers, and scholars rely on to find and cite web pages and digital objects. For some, the ability to reference documents accurately over time is less of a concern compared to functionality and fancy design—but the lack of URLs for specific “documents” (in the broad sense of the word) on some AJAX sites make it troubling for academic use. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, surmised that his archive may hold the blog of a future president; if she’s using some of the latest AJAX-based websites, we historians will have a very hard time finding her early thoughts because they won’t have a fixed (and indexable) address.

If not implemented carefully, AJAX (like Flash) could end up like the lamentable 1990s web technology “frames,” which could, for instance, hide the exact address of a scanned medieval folio in a window distinct from the site’s navigation, as in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek’s Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts site—watch how the URL at the top of your browser never changes as you click on different folios, frustrating anyone who wants to reference a specific page. Accurate citations are a core requirement for academic work. We need to be able to reference URLs that aren’t simply a constantly changing, fluid environment.

At the Center for History and New Media, our fantastic web developers Jim Safley and Nate Agrin have implemented AJAX in the right way, I believe, for our Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. In prior projects that gathered recollections and digital objects like photographs for future researchers, such as the September 11 Digital Archive, we worried about making the contribution form too long. We wanted as many people as possible to contribute, but we also knew that itchy web surfers are often put off by multi-page forms to fill out.

Jim and Nate solved this tension brilliantly by making the contribution form for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank dynamic using AJAX. The form is relatively short but certain sections can change or expand to accept different kinds of objects, text, or geographical information depending on the interactions of the user with the form and accompanying map. It is simultaneously rich and unimposing. When you click on a link that says “Provide More Information” a new section of the form extends beyond the original.

Once a contribution has been accepted, however, it’s assigned a useful, permanent web address that can be referenced easily. Each digital object in the archive, from video to audio to text, has its own unique identifier, which is made explicit at the bottom of the window for that object (e.g., “Cite as: Object #139, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Preserving the Stories of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, 17 November 2005, <http://www.hurricanearchive.org/details.php?id=139>”).

AJAX will likely have a place in academic digital projects—just a more narrow place than out on the wild web.

OK, so you can now run Windows on a Mac. So what? For most of us in the humanities, all we need is already on the Mac, which (in addition to intangibles such as the Mac’s design) is why so many of us remain stubbornly attached to Apple’s computers while over the last twenty years almost everyone else has moved to the more generic platform of the PC. Most educational, graphics, and web development software is available for the Mac. (For those in the social and natural sciences, on the other hand, many important software packages are either not available for the Mac or come out later than they do for the PC.) But perhaps there’s the rub. Since many of us only use Macs—especially those that build academic or museum websites—we often don’t see how most people view our sites. Since websites often render differently on different operating systems and web browsers, not checking how your site will look (and perform, if you are using dynamic web technologies) on a PC with IE (still 85% of web surfers) is unwise. Now with Parallels Workstation—the Windows-on-Mac solution that doesn’t require rebooting your computer to switch OSes—you can literally have a window into the world of Windows sitting on your desktop in parallel with your Mac applications. For instance, here’s a screenshot of my Mac desktop with Firefox for the Mac running on the left, and IE for Windows running on the right:

Looks to me like I need to work on the font size differential between Macs and PCs.

This parallelism of operating systems is incredibly handy for web development on a single machine. At the Center for History and New Media we have gone through phrases where we have paid for services that send us static images of our websites on different platforms and in different browsers. We also spend a lot of time running from our Macs over to PCs to check how everything is looking. Now we can do this all on one machine, easily and instantaneously.

Now I just need to install another window for the 2% of web surfers using Linux…

If your work deals in some way with the history of science, technology, or industry, and you would like to learn how to create online history projects, the Echo Project at the Center for History and New Media is running another one of our free, week-long workshops. The workshop covers the theory and practice of digital history; the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history; genres of online history; website infrastructure and design; document digitization; the process of identifying and building online history audiences; and issues of copyright and preservation.

As one of the teachers for this workshop, I can say somewhat immodestly that it’s really a great way to get up to speed on the many (sometimes complicated) elements necessary for website development. Unfortunately space is limited, so be sure to apply online by March 10, 2006. The workshop will take place from June 12-16, 2006, at George Mason University’s Arlington campus, right outside of Washington, DC. It is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the National History Center, and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. There is no registration fee, and a limited number of fellowships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars. Hope to see you there!