Tag: Visualization

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The relationship between technology and digital archives is linear. As our society modernizes we turn to technology more than ever before. With that being said, our society is now the most efficient it has ever been. Digital artifacts is an example of how much more efficient our society is, in ways we probably never expected.

With one click we can see a variety of data presented in graphs, charts, tables and maps. Digital artifacts can draw conclusions in the form of visuals that physical words cannot. The variety of visuals “help us to perceive patterns in data that we might otherwise miss” (187). As Whitley says, “they challenge us to read texts differently than we otherwise would” (186). Digital artifacts open the door to a lot more than words can and ever will. Although Whitley addresses that some literature scholars may argue that words are considered data, cognitively words cannot conclude the same patterns that visuals can.

Digital artifacts have many advantages as they can reach a much larger population in a short amount of time. The accessibly is increased to anyone who is interested and has internet available. Those who are interested don’t have to travel to these physical artifact sights, they can simply find the information they need in a couple of clicks at most.

However this lowers the value of the physical artifact. The historical value is lost as all the information is taken from it and displayed for anyone interested online. I believe that as our society is advancing we are losing value in physical objects. Is this necessarily good or bad? I am not sure. I believe there should be some value in the physicality of objects and artifacts. Seeing the true artifact is rare and much more moving than seeing the same words typed in the same font online. The general population is starting to lose this attachment to physical objects because of the benefits and normality of having digital copies so accessible.

Having the same information, if not more, available online is much more efficient and productive. This shift towards digital value does shape our interests. There is a bigger focus on developing the skills needed with technology. There are computer sufficiency exams for many jobs and education programs as well as a push towards computer science and technology based skills. Because of the massive amount of jobs that need to be filled, the push towards these majors has increased. Years ago, computer science and digital humanities was not anywhere near the popularity it currently is. These areas of interest are constantly increasing as the need for them is growing.

There are many jobs available to continue to digitize our world. This can be seen as a disadvantage because of the amount of money it costs to change artifacts into accessible digital artifacts. It is an economic investment that will pay off in the long run. After exploring the Moravian Lives website as well as the Old Weather project, a similarity I found was that they both are crowdsourcing. This search for large groups of people to help with a project is an example of how the public is being asked to help modernize our world.

 

The opportunities that the use of digital artifacts brings to our society seem to outweigh the disadvantages. I believe we should continue to use the technological advantages to benefit us but to keep using printed sources for certain aspects of life.

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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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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.

 

 

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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