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Blog #1: “On Material and Digital Archives”

Creating a digital artifact from archival documents allows for a much more pleasurable experience for research. Digital artifacts are able to compile vast amounts of information into one place. This allows for much more accessibility, than traveling the world viewing artifacts in each location. Many more people are able to view artifacts online, where they do not have the time or money to view all those artifacts in person. Additionally, many artifacts are in old handwriting styles that not everybody can understand, so digitizing these allows everybody to be able to easily view. Also, many artifacts are old and very fragile, but digitizing these allows anybody to view artifacts without risk of damaging preserved materials. I feel these digital artifacts are sufficient enough that there is basically no need to view the physical original artifacts. When transcribed and put together well, these digital artifacts provide all the information you would acquire from viewing the physical artifact. These articles are often categorized allowing you to more specifically research your interests.Overall, digital artifacts allow for viewers to easily find more information in one place than ever possible before. 

One problem I could see occurring from digital artifacts is human error. When texts are transcribed by humans, there is always the possibility of something being transcribed poorly. This would result in the research of an inaccurate representation of an artifact. Another issue is these digital artifacts need to be maintained well also. The digital world is constantly evolving, so these resources need to have people making sure their artifacts are staying up to the standards. This causes more time and money to go into the process. However, if everything is transcribed well, digital artifacts are much more efficient for researchers, though take much effort from authors.

I believe while the world is evolving, so are the research strategies. Researchers are often interacting more with the material on the screen rather than the printed page. This allows for accessibility to more researchers, creating even more information. As research continues to evolve into the digital world, we will continue to have more information provided at the click of a button. This is truly a remarkable evolution, as there has never been so much knowledge in one place than we have today.

Also, digitized texts are able to highlight key pieces of information one might not even notice through printed texts. Long artifacts would be skimmed through by most people. But through design of a digital source, authors are able to highlight pieces of information they find important. For example, the Selfie City (http://selfiecity.net/#) page I explored provides statistics on what they believed to be their most important findings. This clearly shows viewers the key pieces of information they might not pick up on while researching on their own.

The Moravian Lives project contains a map, which shows viewers where the authors found all their information. This is the same experience I had when viewing The Early Map of London (https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm). These authors make sure to provide exactly where their sources come from allowing users to easily verify the authenticity of their work, limiting any possibility of error in one’s research. Additionally, they both start with a distant view, but allow you to zoom in on areas of focus, giving researchers full control over their work.

 

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Nathan Ware’s Blog post #1

Throughout the last few decades, the world has experienced a technological explosion. What I mean by this statement is that society is progressively becoming tech-savvy. As a result of recent trends, such as the rise of personal computing in the late 1980’s, society can now view the world through a new lens. These computers transformed the world into an environment reliant on the internet with audio, visuals, and graphics. Consequently, the field of Digital Humanities was created. What was once a civilization reliant on traditional literature, is now being transitioned to use visualization to offer additional interpretations to standard text.

Digital Humanities is changing a world in which knowledge was taught through texts and stationary pictures and progressing to a world that produces and organizes knowledge through graphic designs and more. Now, multiple authors can work collaboratively and efficiently through the new age of technology to create a product that adheres to human’s natural tendency to register shapes and patterns. However, any abrupt changes to society inevitably result in reluctant critics. These critics call upon an important question: What are the benefits and detriments of creating a digital artifact compared to an archival document?  

An effective starting point to this argument would be to consider what ways digital versions of material texts highlight physical elements of texts that might otherwise pass unremarked. In his article “Visualizing the Archive”, Edward Whitley reflects upon how the human brain processes information. “Humans are quite adept at perceptual visual cues and recognizing subtle shape differences. In fact, it has been shown that humans can distinguish shape during the pre-attentive psychophysical process” (Whitley, 193). This fact entails that human brains are pre-wired to process and visualize shapes. While critics point out that traditional text encourages the reader to absorb the details of the material by reading more attentively, this benefit is outweighed when the text becomes too complex. The human brain can only take in a finite amount of information before details are lost. The Digital Humanities offer a solution to this problem by graphically displaying information that summarizes text in a way that’s easier on the human mind. By visualizing commonalities of the text, the viewer experiences serendipitous discovery of underlying themes that would have remained unapparent through standard text.

The picture below is from the project called “Lincoln at 200”. This project is connected to a website that allows the viewer to navigate through two website exhibitions. By adding structure to this website, the reader can view text documents in an organized manner. If it were a traditional text, the viewer would miss out on this organization leading to that person to interpret the reading less accurately. Using websites such as this one, scholars can create online reading interfaces that can more closely approximate the experience of reading physical materials.

 

 

On the other hand, literature provides some perks that computers can’t. Since computers were a recent invention, history is discovered through mainly literature. In the project called “Old Weather”, ship logs from the 19th and 20th century are vital for climate scientists. However, the handwriting can’t be processed by computers. Only the human eye can read these documents. The picture below is an example of one of these ship logs. By decrypting the text into modern English, not only can we sample the lives of these sailors, but scientists can grasp a better understanding of their climate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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MOOCs(massive open online courses),an approachable format to receive higher education for college students.

Open-source and free digitized materials that college student are most familiar with are the MOOCs(massive open online courses) that distinguished universities offer. Compared with traditional further education that universities offered by professors mostly, more than half of the MOOCs offered in Chinese universities are held by non-professors. As the lecturers of the MOOCs mainly focused on the current students’ intellectual interests, the course materials are devised to be more readable, with fewer official language than the traditional courses contain. Besides, the MOOCs do not limit the capacity of a class so strictly so that most of the students may access it in their own convenience through the Internet on any electronic devices like smartphones and PCs, without time and space limits. This will also liberate professors’ time and energy which will be alternatively be utilized, like delving into research programs. However, for students who get used to absorbing most of their new knowledge from the website, often they might struggle with classroom discussions which includes alternative views of thinking.

 

Gender setting on WeChat,a social media app.Only two options you may choose on social media, one is male and the other is female.

Nowadays,social media is a second ID for people to get to know each other. Billions of people around the world use social media daily to get to know strangers. And the personal information posted on the social media is actually an essential part of digital archives representing our modern society. Sadly, the fact is that today’s society is still a men-dominated society. In the USA case, for example,white men dominate over every single field, including the digital archival materials. Women fill out their social media personal information and often their profile photos are overly software-processed photos to illustrate their personal fashion taste or beauty while men just fill out their profile photo with the super stars or other symbols which represent power and social status. As a woman, I may have the higher risk of receiving sexual implication social media messages from unknown persons than a man has, just because social media gender setting as female, which is gender-biased. And in some social media apps, say WeChat, the options of gender are only male and female. Apparently, transgendered people lose their opportunities to choose their gender identity on WeChat. The digital technologies may only be another platform for the society to ostracize woman and under-represented group from the mainstream. So far, the people with less political speaking rights might be continuingly challenged daily unless the society shifts into a more gender equal harmonious circulation.

 

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Blog Post #1

Because of the new wave of technology, people are able to gather more information and have it become more accessible to a larger audience. The ability to access a plethora of resources on various subjects gives digital archives an advantage over archival documents. It is more time efficient to access documents on an online database than searching through a physical collection of printed documents. Search mode enables people to save time by instantly looking up whatever information rather than manually looking through each print. Another advantage to creating digital versions of documents is the fact that physical documents deteriorate over time due to weathering and physical handling. However, a disadvantage of creating digital artifacts is losing the authenticity of the original works. The physical and written structure of printed documents and the style of handwriting get lost in translation when they are turned into digital artifacts. Due to this, learning about a period’s culture is not possible because of the disappearing evidence of handwriting styles, writing styles, etc.. The way people write shows the cultural expectations for that time period. For example, flowery poetry was popular from the late 1700s to the 1900s in Britain and the United States. Knowing the long, wordy style of “flowery poetry” it indicates what those cultures valued: artistic and emotive expression. Although digital documents can use visualization like word clouds to show the most commonly used words in a document, it does not show the adjectives in between which distinguishes flowery poetry from other styles. In terms of what kind of knowledge digital archives offer, they give people access to a multitude of documents from all time periods which enables them to make connections over long periods of time unlike physical archives which are more tiring to look though.

It is hard to answer the ultimate question of which method is better because each has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, the way people read digital versus print documents is different. So in a sense, digital artifacts do supplant our needs for print because visualization tools like word pattern graphs and text images that use shape, color, texture help the mind process the digital information better. However, reading online documents by browse and search mode encourages readers to skim and search for the information they want instead of reading slowly. Print documents require inspection, sift, and synthesis because they do not include visualization like word clouds. Close reading is a good skill for understanding the little nuances in a text and aids in understanding the information on a deeper level since it focuses on word choice and phrasing. To encourage that in digital texts, it might be effective to not put in so many images that it distracts the reader from reading the text itself. It is easy to mistake those images as conclusions themselves rather than a means to a conclusion.

Comparing the Moravian Lives project with other large DH projects, similarities like categorizing documents. The Moravian website has a map which enables the reader to visualize where the documents originate from. They are also categorized by language, country and archive. Quanitfying Kissinger also uses network analysis to visualize all the information sourced from the documents for comparison. Because large DH porjects have large quanitities of data, they use distant reading to visualize patterns to understand the overarching ideas.