lifelong learners, for K-12 classrooms
It will be interesting to see the effects, in the future, of the new generation that is now growing up with full access to great technology and incredible resources. Scholarship is already being influenced, so it interesting to think about what sort of minds will come out of an education system influenced heavily by technology and digital skills.
if it takes fuller advantage of the digital medium and innovates more aggressively.
Not only this, but also just becoming more widely known about and accepted. The fact that 99% of people have no idea what I'm talking about when I say "digital humanities" is a testament to the fact that its impact and potential can not be fully experienced until it reaches the masses and people are more familiar with the concept of digital scholarship.
Innovations that would have amazed us ten years ago are now merely passing news, as transient as a tweet. Music, video, and journalism have been profoundly altered—and we have grown used to their new forms.
But also there have been the introductions of new mediums and forms that continue to innovate and still amaze us. For example, VR is becoming increasingly popular, and is vastly different from standard video, and the technology behind it is still developing and becoming more advanced.
nence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are every-where. There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before,
shows how frustrated she is by the the wallpaper
By scraping spatial data from archives of unprecedented vastness, researchers stood a better chance than ever before of addressing problems of tremendous size.
Do they have to do this all by hand? Or is there a more efficient method, such as a program that can pinpoint the approximate source of an item on a map. If there was a software for this, how accurate would it be for items already existing from pre-internet eras?
hundreds of hours of videogame recordings
This is a very interesting concept, because everyone's experience playing a video game will be different, because everyone has different knowledge, skill, styles of playing, etc. How do they choose what play-through of a game is "correct" or the "most valid"? It would be impossible to get recordings of every single person playing the game ever.
What would "science of culture" driven by massive data look like, and what will be its limitations?
Like a new form of anthropology, but instead of being more personal focused and informed by interviews of a community, it's larger scale and informed by digital data. Then we need to think about how that data was obtained?
An internet blackout. In protest of two proposed U.S. congressional laws that threatened freedom of speech on the Web, SOPA and PIPA, 115,000 websites voluntarily blacked out their homepages, replacing them with pleas to petition congress to stop the a bills.
reminds me of the online protests that occurred last year when the FCC was threatening net neutrality
convince them not to vote
a very problematic suppression of the voices of people in America, can not be ignored
Burning Man, a city of 70,000 people that exists for only a week in a Nevada desert, before disappearing back into the sand until the following year.
would be a very interesting case study to look at the passage of time in this one spot, see how it changes over the course of the year when it's not this one week
StoryMap JS offers a slide-show-like interface where the user can connect text and images to places in a sequential narrative
so it's like watching a journal unfold chronologically and watching where they have traveled, or where each story/part takes place, allows the audience to connect spatially where things are
These maps show one or several variables (or themes) arranged spatially on a map.
this could be an interesting visual to look at in the context of my WWI posters archive, seeing where each poster is from, and where the heaviest focus on propaganda was placed
Every piece of the map is presented in the eternal present. After all, its chief value is that it does not go out of date
Not actually 100% true. For example, if I look at a street view map of my home town, there are certain new buildings that are not represented because they were not constructed at the time the pictures were taken, or certain areas that have changed, which is not represented. And this is only 45 minutes away from Google headquarters, so I would assume this is even more so the case further away, and internationally. Maps can only be updated so often, and no map is perfectly accurate all the time
I am not so much arguing that one mode is causally related to the other but, rather, that they both represent a move toward modular knowledges, knowledges increasingly prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century.
so essentially, getting smarter is not only about what we can invent, but how we can reinvent our perceptions of already pre-existing concepts
I have here suggested that our technological formations are deeply bound up with our racial formations and that each undergo profound changes at midcentury.
So are our perceptions of race and the advancement of technology are somehow linked?
“Why are the digital humanities, well, so white?”
Ideally, what is chosen to be included in databases and archives to be preserved should be chosen by the people being represented and having their experiences shared, such as the minority group that is sharing their unique experiences with the world
respects intellectual property rights
can you put copyrighted works into a collection? I would imagine you could, because it's kid of like creating a playlist of other people's songs for other people to access and use
some measurement of use
what does this mean? like how many people are using it regularly?
Good metadata uses standard controlled vocabularies to reflect the what, where, when and who of the content.
Library of Congress does a good job of this
should be appropriate to the materials in the collection, users of the collection, and intended, current and likely use of the digital object.
making sure the type of person using the data will be able to understand the method of organization, and that the given categories make sense and are relevant to finding topics within the collection
Collections should be described so that a user can discover important characteristics of the collection, including scope, format, restrictions on access, ownership, and any information significant for determining the collection's authenticity, integrity and interpretation.
describing each entry to the collection, so that we can more quickly relocate it later, using metadata searches
While a good many of the early small-scale digital projects have been displaced or lost from our current digital canon, a few have managed not only to survive but to thrive.
as technology advances, if sites are not updated, they will stop being used, and will be forgotten
digital canon
But the "digital canon" is still being created
We imagined that the free access to materials on the web would allow those previously cut off from intellectual capital to gain materials and knowledge that might be leveraged to change the social position of people of color. The new space of the Internet would allow those who had been silenced to have a voice.
But also, not everyone in the world has easy access to the internet, so it's still not 100% an end-all solution
Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon
It's interesting how this site has its own system of annotation and commenting, highlighting sentences, etc. They're actively trying to get more people to communally participate in the discussion online
focus on the connections between them.
This is the most important part, you can look at the connections between data to form a narrative or story, making it easier for audiences to comprehend, understand, and experience, rather than just looking at disjointed data or numbers
Most archives, when they receive a new item, quickly record as much information as possible about it, its provenance, and its condition on a standardized worksheet.
Like what we did with the spreadsheet, taking notes about the essential details of the item, and how it may be used, then keeping it in a collection
PDFs, being the most common type, are black holes unless the individual words are recognizable to your computer, so make sure you run them all through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program.
For instance, we can't use Hypothesis to annotate on PDFs, since the text is not highlight-able
grouping materials geographically, by topic, by theoretical framework, or by any other sort of grouping that makes sense for the material. In this case, it helps to imagine all of the information is spread out on a table, allowing you to manipulate it into different configurations. Archivists achieve this synchronic system with the help of metadata.
Like I was mentioning, using keywords or terms to categorize and build relationships between data, then you can use this to inform your reorganization of the data and make it a bit easier to make sense of
How is it organized?
Keywords that categorize and build relationships between each entry, can build subdivisions of entries and such
it also enriches the context of the archived item for researchers and facilitates use of the collection as a whole.
It also can make it easier to categorize, if you're looking to find items with only a certain specific quality
precedes us and will continue long after we are gone
Well, only if it's preserved correctly. We have to find ways to continue to make our sources relevant, and reliably easily accessible
Smith signed such notable artists as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison, Frank Zappa, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles.
so he himself was also a very influential figure to music, but in a much more unseen behind-the-scenes way
recollections of working in a racially segregated society
exposes the struggles of a diverse group of people, just like the goal of DH, understanding how the world is from a different point of view
short-lived popularity
what it's like to be in the public spotlight, then leave it, an experience that not many get
problems with drug addiction
a very prevalent issue in society, even today, and even more prominent in the music industry
restrictive work environment
exposing parts of the industry that we as consumers wouldn't normally see, it's a unique perspective that only very few people get to experience firsthand
creation of an electric guitar in 1929
invention and innovation driving the industry and making change in our culture
description of Mick Jagger as conservative
politics and music, a typically left-dominated field
metadata that was transitioning out from the evidence to analysis.
Evidence like tables can form their own narratives by interpreting the data from them, contrary to what the article says about spreadsheets being the antithesis to narrative and stories. Even just looking at a change in numbers of something over time tells its own story in a way
Our goal when we began this project in 1996 was to make all of Whitman's work freely available online: poems, essays, letters, journals, jottings, and images, along with biographies, interviews, reviews, and criticism of Whitman.
it's a whole view of the person, his life, and his work, and everything that surrounds it
mixing poetry and prose, sometimes on the same page, testing the boundaries of genre and performing typographical experiments that forced readers to engage the printed page in ways they were not accustomed to, precisely by slipping across the bounds of genre.
kind of like how some artists do with music, blurring genres instead of being defined by rules
This battle between database and narrative
why not both? blur genre lines like Whitman did?
For him, the world was a kind of preelectronic database, and his notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars—sights and sounds and names and activities—that he dutifully enters into the record.
he was compiling databases and archives of his own life too (but maybe bias of what he kept? who knows)
oral history
allows for more nuanced individual expression without worrying about skill of writing and such
or their creators didn’t have an immediate purpose to preserve them
is it always up to the creator to be responsible to preserve it?
People who have experienced trauma or suffered atrocities may not want their stories preserved in an archive at all
balance between ethics and preservation of factual knowledge itself for the future
ensure our archives represent all voices, not just those in power
people in power probably have more easily accessible records, harder to find more oppressed narratives (lack of literacy, suppression of freedoms, etc)
equitable access to those records by opening their doors to all audiences and working to remove any potential barriers to access.
reminds me of Three Identical Strangers, when they couldn't get access to the experiment's results, when they didn't know they were being studied without consent, and they were the subjects of the findings that were locked up, and they couldn't see them
It’s important for all public archives to maintain accountability by preserving an accurate record of the past, even if that record doesn’t paint the institution in the best light
can not let bias or personal agendas get in the way of what information is selectively preserved and what is left behind. one challenge that many archivists may face is avoiding this problem
provide access to materials that represent diverse populations. In Special Collections, we aim to encompass intersections of all identities, including race, economic status, gender and sexuality, religion, and politics. Today’s archivists work to increase instances of previously unrepresented and underrepresented people once silenced from the historical record.
shows experiences of humanity from a variety of perspectives, and helps further understanding of the human experience in society
but archivists have unique responsibilities to society
sharing stories, preserving information for the future to see, etc
These could be: destructive acid migration; excessive or improper handling; and natural disasters such as fires and floods that can wipe out a whole archive in an instant
would it be any safer to put it stored online? or is that just as volatile, relying on server, possibly?
indefinitely accessible
links to idea from class of anywhere and anyone, via internet
collecting priorities and available resources?
reminds me of discussion in Medieval History class, what was kept in records, and what was their priority to keep in writing, to preserve, and transcribe and copy down for future versions. Tells us about the culture and interests and priorities of the people at the time
historically significant materials are in a stable condition to last as long as possible.
who decides what is historically significant enough to be saved and preserved? what we are looking back for in the future may not be found because it wasn't deemed "important enough" in modern times by our standards
Archival processing requires a lot of tough decisions
having to decide what is included, whose voices are heard and what stories are made available, like with the Prison Archives