When Atlantic Cities journalist Emily Badger asked my MAGIC colleague Michael Howser to describe the 1934-to-present interactive aerial map viewer we created for the OnTheLine project, he told her that it was the “next best thing to a time machine.” That’s my favorite quote of the year. Read Emily’s blog post and eye-catching screenshots, which inspired many readers to visit our site and take a trip into Connecticut’s past. See also Keir Clarke’s Google Maps Mania post about our site, which appeared a few days beforehand and led Atlantic Cities to contact us.

We held a video conversation and broadcasted it live on Friday July 6th, 2012 from 12 noon to 1pm eastern time. We’re experimenting with Google+ Hangout video conferencing to communicate with colleagues from different locations about digital humanities projects. I hosted this informal conversation with:

• Michael Howser, University of Connecticut Libraries MAGIC
• Anna Kijas, University of Connecticut Libraries
• Christine Pittsley, Connecticut State Library
• Roger Travis, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Connecticut
• Jon Voss, Strategic Partnerships Director at HistoryPin

With this tool, up to 10 participants may interact live, and anyone may watch the public video feed, which was broadcasted live on this web post and also made available for later viewing. If this video conference format doesn’t scare everyone away, we might rotate hosting duties and schedule additional open discussions in the future.

To participate in a video chat:

• post a comment on this page about a digital humanities question you’d like to raise with the group and/or a tool or site that you wish to demonstrate via screensharing
• register for a free Google+ account, and click on my Google+ profile to add me to your circles, and I’ll receive a notification to add you to my circles
• on the date & time above, log into your Google+ page and look for an invitation to join our “hangout” (video conference session). PS: it’s BYOL – bring your own lunch!

OR if you prefer to listen into our conversation, look for the YouTube broadcast video feed that will appear below during our session, which also will be converted automatically into a video recording for future viewing. Learn more about how it works.

(Discussion starts around minute 2:00)

Links shown or mentioned in the video:

http://www.historypin.com

Linked Open Data – Libraries Archives and Museums

http://oldmapsonline.org

CT State Data Center, population projections in Google Fusion Tables

MAGIC UConn Libraries, Air Navigation Maps

http://www.playthepast.org/, and Roger’s post on Operation MENIS

The Pericles Group game-based learning

Pox and the City: Challenges in Writing a Digital History Game

C0nnecticut Forum on Digital Initiatives

Still working out many details, of course, but the redesigned Fall 2011 preview edition of On The Line is coming together. The biggest difference is that this version relies on conventional WordPress bottom-of-the-page commenting, supplemented with the experimental Highlighter plugin. These tools replace the paragraph-level CommentPress or digress.it plugins, which I decided were less appropriate for this particular site, though I will continue to use them on another web-book, Writing History in the Digital Age. Feedback is welcome.

Click to open in a new tab/window.

Curtis Denton, Jon Pollack, and Michael Howser at UConn Libraries MAGIC have begun a series of posts that describe how we designed and created interactive maps for the OnTheLine project. The first in this series is Redlining in Hartford area, 1937: A Web-Based Map with Linked Documents.

Many thanks to Bill Sullivan and Connecticut State Library colleagues for kindly offering to add the OnTheLine web-book preview to iConn’s list of freely accessible e-books