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I believe that we have started to look at textual material on the screen more than on a manuscript/printed page. Why go to the document when you can bring the document to you?  The rise of technology is what is forcing humanities toward digital humanities: it has become effortless to pull up a document on your phone or computer. This switch to digital humanities means the research practices in the humanities must change as well. For digital humanities, a change in research practices does not simply mean understanding how to scan and upload documents. A large portion of the practice requires understanding of the use of visualization In the Whitley reading, Johanna Trucker defined visualization as, “A methodological reversal which makes visualization a procedure rather than a product and integrates interpretation into digitization in a popular way.” I love how she defined this because the last eight words really capture the essence of digital humanities: ‘integrates interpretation into digitization in a popular way.’ With the help of visualization, humanities will not fall behind in the wave of technological advance.

Digitized materials supplant the need to view to physical original copies. With the transition to visualization in the work of digital humanities, new ways of reading have come about. According to the Whitley reading, two new ways of reading are spatial reading and distant reading. Spatial reading means extracting the valuable information from a text so that you do not have to read it in a normal manner. Distant reading refers to stepping back and looking at trends between thousands of books/documents over time. These two new forms of reading supplant the need to view the original copies. I am not saying that we should just throw out the physical copies, but as long as we scan them, then we should not need to use them as much anymore.

Example of distant reading

I would say there is not yet a consensus for digitizing and editing archival material. However, that does not mean that some common practices for digitizing material have not arisen. One practice that was mentioned in the Whitley reading is tag clouds. These tag clouds can be designed in different ways, but their main use is to show the statistics for word count or word uniqueness in a document. Tag clouds are used to turn reading from a qualitative process to a quantitative process. The biggest advancement of tag clouds is that it connects with the idea of distant reading. By using tag clouds to look at word uniqueness in different documents, we can see how the uniqueness of words has changed over time. Tag clouds are even used on the DH site to show the most common places that have come up in their documents.

Example of a tag cloud on the DH site

 

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Blog Post #1: “On Material and Digital Archives”

An advantage of creating a digital artifact from archival documents is that there is a much larger amount of data and information available for researchers and the general public. Artifacts and manuscripts that have been too frail for people to look at and use in the past are now accessible. We are now able to use the information, that we never had access to before, to help learn from the past and improve in the future. Researchers and other individuals can link information together and find patterns and trends that they would have never been able to have done before.

This old ship’s log can help us learn from the past, so that we can create a bright future.

However, one of the problems associated with creating digital artifacts is that the computational techniques usually used to store these digital archives cause limitations to those interested in seeing them. Also, the process itself of turning an artifact into a digital archive can be dangerous to the artifact. It is so old and so fragile that it can get damaged very easily. Another problem that I see with creating digital artifacts is the large margin for human error. Most of the times, people are the ones converting the archive to a digital medium and they could misread the writing or accidentally make a typo that makes the artifact inaccurate.

The side by side view of Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscript in print and the digitized one created by an individual demonstrates the margin for human error and how difficult deciphering manuscripts can be.

I feel that digital archives do not supplant our need to view the physical originals, or enhance the necessity of and desire for archival work. I think that the easy accessibility that digital artifacts provides takes away the excitement for researchers. Though they can just easily look online for the one thing they are looking for instead of having to do research to find it. They will not get to experience the extreme happiness that they feel when they discover something which could eventually cause them to lose passion for their topic of interest. I believe that researchers learn the most when they are looking for information because they run into other data along the way and learn even more when they see the archive in context.

That being said, I feel that open-source and free digitized materials provide opportunities for students and other people looking for specific material to find things that they otherwise would not find. They are able to explore topics in a much deeper manner and discover things that they never even would have thought of. I think the use of these materials also help individuals discover something that interests them that they may have never known existed before looking at digital archives. Students are able to study groups of people that they never heard of and provide them with a much broader perspective on the world and the world’s history.

I believe that because of the creation of digital archives, our research practices have dramatically changed. Most information people need is on the computer and is accessible across the world, so there is no need for individuals to go to the library. Instead of working in groups and dividing up parts of research projects, people are more likely to work on their own and not collaborate with other individuals. I think the use of digital archives have taken the socialization element out of research. I believe that it is a shame because people learn the most from one another and are the most successful when they are working with others because they get different perspectives they would not have thought of otherwise.

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As our overall understanding of modern technology progresses, so does the potential of Digital Humanities. One of the main advantages of Digital Humanities is that these archival documents can be processed onto a digital library, where they can be easily accessible from all over the world. Somebody can be continents away, and still be able to read the manuscript of Jane Austen. Another major advantage of creating a digital artifact from archival documents is that finding individual words or sections is made extremely easier and more convenient.  This could help better process all of the messages that the specific author was trying to convey in his/her work or manuscript.

There are few disadvantages to creating a digital artifact from archival documents. In my opinion, the rarity of these documents that have been preserved for hundreds of years is significantly decreased when this digital transfer happens. These documents are now easily accessible, and thus lose part of their historical importance .With the digital version of the manuscript, one would be missing so much of the actual piece. Mainly, the digital transfer impedes on the aesthetic of the documents.

As I explored the Moravian Lives projects, I found it shared quite a few similarities with other large-scale DH Projects. I found out that along with these other projects, Moravian Lives heavily relies on crowdsourcing to keep it running. Many people contribute to help trace the history of the Moravian Church.

A page on the Moravian Lives website

I believe we are interacting with the textual material more on the screen than on the page. In the age of digital humanities, the physical interaction with the textual material is primarily composed of transcribing it to digital format. There are not really efficient ways to analyze the material when it is presented as one long, physical manuscript. We are interacting a lot more with the material on the screen than on paper. With all of the material digitized, it makes it easier for us to analyze the text based on word usage (find the prevalence of a specific word with respect to each author) or find a certain part of the manuscript without having to read through the entire thing first. Our research practices are changing to involve more textual analysis than anything, and this allows us to make useful diagrams such as word maps or frequency charts.

Open-source and free digitized materials offer unbounded pedagogical opportunities. After doing a little bit of research, I found a website called DIRT, which is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. It provided an extensive list of downloadable programs for about forty or so different digital research techniques that could range from analyzing data relationships to even transcribing manuscripts!. DIRT is a public domain website, so student are able to use this for all of their digital humanities needs.The opportunities are seemingly endless in that there are so many different sources. For example, when I clicked “analysis”, there were at least one hundred different websites or programs that were provided. According to Whitley, this allows for “distant reading”. The data can be analyzed better because more connections are being established.

DIRT provides a great amount of resources to aid analysis

I believe that instead of supplanting our need to view the physical originals, digitized materials enhance the necessity and desire for archival work. Whitley explained how digital tools can help create more questions, which could result in a more complex look into the data. The realm of humanities has never been more excited than in this digital era. With digital humanities, we can now process manuscripts and data with more efficiency than we ever have in all humanity. This makes the necessity of archival work at an all time peak, because we have gained the ability to ubiquitously transcribe and analyze documents that were previously untouched and unmarked. The significance of humanities right now is at an all time high, and the more crowdsourcing we can get working on it, the more we’ll really be able to analyze all those who came before us!

 

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Blog #1: On Material and Digital Archives

Historic artifacts help us get a glimpse of the past and how it compares with the present. Although a lot of these texts are preserved in their original condition, they are inaccessible to most of the population. Digital archiving helps address this problem as well as the problem of artifacts degrading over time. There are many advantages of creating a digital archive from historical artifacts. Digitalizing allows the artifact to be spread out while still being preserved in its original condition. Digital archiving allows for even more to be done with the artifact. We can transcribe the documents, perform word analysis to find the most important ideas and find patters that humans cannot find without the help of a computer. There are a few disadvantages of using primarily digital archive. A digital edition of an artifact might not invoke the emotions a physical copy does. With a physical edition, we can analyze the condition of the paper itself to see if there are any clues as to how things were. Nevertheless, digital archiving, if done properly, could replace the need for the physical copy.

As we digitalize more textual materials, the printed copy becomes less significant as a way to discover history and more of a collective item. An emphasis of the digital version helps the research because more people can access the text and contribute to a single project. As mentioned in the Whitley reading, it will help visualize the text and allow for both a distinct and a spacial reading. It will allow us to see the greater message behind the texts instead of just the text themselves. The Jane Austen archive, similar to the Moravian Lives archive, transcribes the old texts and shows both version, the digital new text as well as the original writing. This allows readers to understand the text using the digitalized text as well as get the experience of reading the original text.

These digital text allow us to perform complex tasks such as word frequency, so we can visualize how often a specific word or phrase is referred in a text. It allows us to see the connection between specific words or phrases, which we would not be able to see in the physical copy of the text. The digital archive allows us to quickly sort through various words and pick out the important ones whereas it would take a person time to do so in a physical archive. Digital archiving might even reveal information that were hidden by finding the patterns in the words that we cannot find. For example, on the right, the word frequency shows that the text referred to the Native Americans throughout history as “Indians”. Recently, that word has been used less frequently, showing how the views of people have changed over time.

Using both the digital and the physical archives, we can learn more about the past, or just preserve fragile texts and other artifacts. Although digital archives are reducing the necessity for the physical version of them, they are still important because sometime the physical copy might reveal something that the digital one cannot.