To Digitize or not Digitize…that is the Question.
…and a very fascinating one at that. This week we had to read a chapter on Digitalization from our Digital History text. As usual though I’m going to interrupt this stream of consciousness world to entreat my fellow classmates to please fill out the online survey regarding the department website. (See below posts)
All of my thoughts coalesce around one topic. Outsourcing….who would have thought that this topic that is such a major contention in the political arena for businesses also has penetrated the world of digitalization. Crazy!
Seriously though, the reading for this week made me think about how different the technology is for text, image, video, and audio digitalization. Learning what TIFF, GIF, and JPEG actually stood for was good, but the amount of shifting that is constantly occurring in the realm of technology constantly fascinates me. We started this class talking about how just ten years ago the internet, for all intents and purposes, was not a tool for the public. Now though through digitalization—accessibility has jumped through the roof….
This leaves me to ponder a historical conundrum, which is not only alluded to in the text but also is intimately connected to the ethical issues of historical practice. Who is doing the interpretation? Is it the historian who chooses the pieces to be archived? The archivist who creates the finding aid? The scanner, who handles the document and/either depending on the level of funding, types up the text into a text file, or makes a photographic copy of the physical document? Also the discussion of machine error when using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software…how does that reflect in the already interpretive laden world of historical analysis?
I have no answers….but perhaps I would say that technology and digitalization presents itself as merely another layer in a continuous redefinition of the historical field. The fundamentals may remain the same, but the tools for practices continuously evolve…and demand newer ethical and creative rules.
************
As for Collecting and Searching….I plan on using much of the information from the previous class in my current research project. That being said—until recently I had plans to co-develop a website with Linda (another student in the class) that linked public history to various audiences. I believe we are rethinking the outline of the project but can see and recognize the different levels of importance that the variety of techniques practiced may have on the project for this class. I do like the idea of collecting stories. Self-narrations make the past real, and tangible— and when produced in conjunction with multiple groups of people reveal just how meaningful the past can be.
The material from class gave me some tips i.e. key words, and searching tools that I can use for my research seminar paper on natural monuments. Also it was interesting to learn about D-spaces—something which I can see having enormous potential in both an academic and non-academic sense.
Directly connecting to the conversation above—the ideas of trust, validity of methodology and practice are things that effect many different fields—even outside the digital world. For example on this morning’s CBS show Sunday Morning a piece was done on the J. Paul Getty Museum’s difficulty (and mayhaps the Met and MFA in Boston) regarding the acquisition and collecting of looted artifacts from Italy and other areas.
Here’s the text about the piece off of Sunday Morning’s Website.:
BRUSH WITH THE LAW
Anthony Mason explores the new Getty Villa that’s just opened in Los Angeles. And we get to find out just why the Italian government is looking so intensely at several American museums. Is that looted artwork Americans are seeing in their museums? We look into the case of the Getty’s former curator of antiquities, Marion True, who is now on trial in Rome for allegedly trafficking in looted artwork. We will also talk with Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about that museum’s negotiations to return some of its treasures to the Italian government.
I guess to sum up my thoughts in a single statement?
It’s a changing world—but the transformation is in the handling—not the content
February 7th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Like you said, history is interpretive-laden, but that is the nature of our field. Every person has a part in interpretation, whether it is in generating the documents, organizing information, writing the history, or consuming history. Each role is vital to the field, and the introduction of digitization is adding another layer to this process. We’ll see over time the true impact this will have.