ECHO underway, posted Thursday, December 9, 2010

We gotta start somewhere.  Here, we use the white board in the conference room and giant-sized Post-It Notes.
 

The place:  Conference room, Connecticut Humanities Council, Middletown, Connecticut

The time:  A weekday afternoon, in late autumn

The people:  Team ECHO

The purpose:  To make Connecticut history happen, in more ways than one

Creating a digital encyclopedia, we have found, ain’t easy. (Don’t worry, Anne Farrow will catch that “ain’t”.) Not only do we have to map the relationships of every entry to each other, we have to learn a new language with which to understand the virtual Connecticut we are creating. Media asset. Granularity. Wireframe. Harvested objects. Semantic Tag Type.

I thought I knew the English language, and then I visited Digital Land. I would tell you this is making my head spin, but “head spin” probably means some sort of interactive widget in Digital-ese.

Widget? That used to mean a small tool or appliance. Now it’s a small computer program.

What we’re not confused about, however, is Connecticut history. The entries we have from our many contributors are rich, our own discoveries ever-fascinating — as we hope the entries on this blog exemplify.

Thank goodness “coffee” still means a caffeine-rich drink. Because we drink a lot of it! But we don’t use the term “java” to mean what it used to mean. And don’t get me started about “cookies.”