Collecting Digital History: Crowd sourcing, Flickr, and the LOC

The assignment for this week is to examine a few ways the internet has made collecting and preserving information easier in the digital age. The importance of preserving the past digitally is emphasized in Chapter 7 of Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History, as the case study of the September 11th attacks on the United states demonstrates. The online community reacted to the event on blogs and discussion boards across the web. The sheer weight of the event and individual reactions to it prompted historians to preserve these responses for future researchers. It has not often been the case in human history that we could record the personal reactions of people to a devastating historical event like 9/11. The 9/11 case study demonstrates the importance of digital preservation. What are the other ways that the internet is used for this task?

Digital archives are quickly becoming the standard of historical preservation. All over the web digital collections are presenting their work for free to anyone to observe. The Library of Congress has digitized an enormous volume of information and presented it online for public access. While browsing the site, one can study collections of old photographs, sound bytes, maps, and newspaper articles. With a LOC account, you can easily store and manage your favorite pieces of the collection. In this way, the LOC has made public access to governmental records not only possible, but easy.

The popular website Flickr takes public access one step further by allowing free flowing user commentary and tagging to its collections. LOC and Flickr have even teamed up to present a few of the LOC's photographic collections through Flickr's commons, thus unleashing the sometimes relentless remarks of the users. The subject here is crowd sourcing. This means that anyone browsing through the photo's on Flickr at any time can respond to the photo's through comments and tagging features.

 

 Is crowd sourcing a good thing? I would have to say yes, it is a useful tact to attract attention to the collection and encourage user feedback. When promoting a site or an online project it can be the historians best friend. It is much easier to receive advice, insights, and criticisms when the content is free for public observation. However, as with all the tools of the digital world, the crowd sourcing  of Flickr commons is not without some criticism. The spellbound blog voices concerns about the problems of crowd sourcing. One of the problems is the unrefined comments posted by some of the users. Some photographs are plagued with nonsensical commentary which is often times irrelevant to the subject.

Google: A Love/Hate Relationship

I can remember the days before the existence of the Google search. Those days when my web browsing 'know how' was limited to clunky search engines like Metacrawler, and Ask Jeeves.com. This was also a time when high speed internet was not widely available and dial-up connection speed was often the best one could hope for. Needless to say, this combination made for a slow rate of successful results when conducting web based research. Nevertheless, these older search engines were the precursor to the wildly popular Google search engine and Google's expanded network of resources today, like, Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Maps. In the world of historical research Google has garnered a tremendous amount of credibility for its precision in searches and user friendliness. The versatility of Google and its applications has allowed a new generation of scholars young and old to praise the resource as a tool for pulling up precise information in a small amount of time. Despite Google's popularity with the masses, there is no lack of criticism and controversy surrounding the web site.

One of the biggest judgments made upon Google is its handling of the Google Books project. Google undertook the project to digitize millions of books and present them as open resources on the web. One staggering question presented by Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at the University of Berkeley, is also shared by the leagues of 'traditionally' trained historians: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right? Nunberg's article: Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars presents some of the concerns that scholars have with the project thus far. Misspellings, faulty classifications, and imprecise searching are to name but a few of the grievances Nunberg and others have with the project.

Elsewhere on the web, Nicholas Carr asks: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr, a reporter for the Atlantic reflects on the technological advances to the ways in which people read and write. From Nietzche's upgrade to a type writer which made his prose "tighter" and "more telegraphic", to the advent of the printing press which has persisted up to the present day, this article focuses on the ways in which our reading and writing technology has simplified our lives and by side effect, may be making us stupider people in the process. Specific cases, like the inability for people to read long passages or many pages in one sitting, are common problems associated with the way Google's programs have allowed the quick access to a world of infinite information.

So these are the concerns and worries of scholars. Will the standards of traditional historians and researchers come crashing down when Google takes full control of information of the digitization of books? It is possible that Google really is making us stupid, the future generations will be more familiar with scanning sources for value and content on the web than they will be pouring over library books in search for their information. 

These worries and drawbacks however, do not deny the superb value Google is to the historian. From my experience, historians will commonly advise against the use  of Wikipedia as a source because its information can be manipulated by anyone. At the same time, which professor has never used the site for a quick look up of a topic? Google has undertaken an ambitious project to make digital books available for free and preview on the web. Applications like Google Scholar are available to help the researcher locate more academic sources. These tools are available for use in addition to the traditional methods of research that which will survive with the digital era. The training of historians in careful research and analysis will not disappear, even if the format in which we gather information does.

Unit II: The players in Digital History

Last week some big questions were posed. What is Digital History? What are its promises to historical studies and the way in which people access, manipulate, and interpret information. It may be a stretch to predict where the field will go and how big it will become in the future. By using the tools and web applications currently available to the public, however, we can at least identify the and master the tools from which the field of digital history is based.

In what ways do both professional and amateur historians utilize the internet for the collection and presentation for history? The web is full of historically based sites that incorporate digital images, primary text documents, audio and visual media, and even 3-D mapping. Historical institutions like the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media, and the University of Nebraska Center for Digital Research in the Humanities have provided links to digital projects around the web in addition to some of the basic programs which historians of the digital age often use, like Zotero and Omeka.

The dawning of the digital age has allowed historical documents from all era's the ability to be digitized and stored in huge online databases. Some of these databases have allowed at least some of the collection to go public on the web. Google alone has undertaken a project to digitize millions of books both in and out of print. Google's project is as daunting as it is revolutionary. For the first time ever, the access to so many books has become available in one place, and with relative ease to navigate.

The readings this week touch on the hesitancy of the fields of the Humanities to 'buy in' to the new wave of digital scholarship. I can't help but think that this reluctant attitude must be in part some innate 'fear' which historians have with properly using and understanding the tools of digital history. In other words, historians will cling to their own traditional methods before they give in to learning the new ones. Too be fair, I can admit to some similar sentiment. What I am learning now however, is that digital history does not mean being able to decipher complicated codes, or even being able produce complex web pages. The tools for creating history in these types of mediums are readily available and, usually, user friendly enough for anyone to learn.

Readings for Week 1

The selection of readings for this week present an introduction to the world of digital history. What exactly is digital history, one might ask? Digital history might be described as any sort of presentation of historical content on a digital format, like: online news articles, museum exhibits, or online scholarly journal databses. Modern historians are inevitably confronted with resources online which present history of all fields in a number of different mediums. In order for future historians, as well as contemporary, to cope with this revolution of information, there must be some set of principles and methods to be established in the field.

Since the advent of the internet and the coming of the digital age, historical information has steadily been posted to the web for anyone to access freely. One of the on-going discussions about this recent revolution has been about the accurate and reliable presentation of this information. Modern websites like Wikipedia have revolutionized the way in which people access information by allowing anybody with a notion to write on any topic and have it published for the rest of the world to see. This has consequently led to a "Wild West" of historical reporting. With so much information just a few clicks away, the digital age has allowed people of all backgrounds with a computer or a smart phone to access literally any topic.



Is traditional history a thing of the past?

To be sure, I love to use websites like www.Wikipedia.com to quickly look up a topic for general information. The question that arises here however, is this: How can we be sure that the information reported is from a reliable source? Trained historians will be able to distinguish fact from bunk, but that doesen't stop less adept (or lazy) researchers like high school students from taking advantage of such a user friendly tool.

All of this leads me to one conclusion: the advances in information technology are growing faster and ever more complex as we continue into the digital age. In order to adapt to these advances historians must be contantly vigilant and thoughtful of modern tools like Wikipedia and the hundreds of other information data bases.

Digital History: Day 1

Today is the first day of the rest of my life...