Week 3 - “Not in French, nor English, nor Mexican” - Understanding Digitization
Since I’m hoping to work with digitization for my final project, this week’s reading was very helpful as a how-to guide and also for important things to keep in mind. I’m hoping to construct my digital image searching/storage/display similarly to JSTOR to give you an idea of the direction I’m heading. I think small file sizes that can be OCR’d (can you use that as a verb?) and still produce good text are what I’m aiming for. I may follow the author’s advice though and scan in better quality images initially to have a better copy saved, but then upload a smaller image that is easier to work with online and hopefully still good enough quality to satisfy users’ needs.
I’m looking forward to discussing marking up text, etc in class (in an attempt to understand what exactly that section meant). It sounded interesting, but I think I’ll have to see some examples along with explanation.
One tangential question/thought that I had while reading about digitization this week was how increasing digitization of sources changes the nature of research and understanding of the past. Let me preface the conversation by saying that I love digitization and regularly use the online newspaper archives that AU has in doing research on recent history. I love being able to search for articles on a specific topic rather than reading through the whole paper for an important date or however people used to do research in the past. However, I wonder if we miss important context or peripheral details by doing this kind of searching and bringing up only relevant articles. In some of my past research, sitting at the microfilm machine scanning through old newspaper pages I would run across interesting related articles that searches never would have found (I forget what we’ve been calling this in class, but I’ll call it the Eureka principle just for kicks). More importantly though when we research the old fashioned way we also see the context that the article was originally printed in. It’s informative to see what other articles were published alongside the article you’re researching and also shapes how we view history if we understand that other important events were occuring at the same time and contemplate how they might have affected each other. I’m definitely not saying digitization is bad, but I do think that as responsible historians we need to think about ways to maintain a sense of context for whatever material we’re researching.
February 6th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
David Ekbladh calls it “serendipity,” but “Eureka principle” works too. I agree that context and happenstance are very important aspects of historical research. After all, if I didn’t have to go through microfilms of the New York Times, I never would have found some of my favorite historical gems: the World War II- era letter to the editor arguing that the trend toward short hair on women would result in female baldness, or the “Me In Kampf” political cartoon of Hitler. But, I think the newspaper databases have found a good compromise: searchable text with links to scanned pages. Not perfect, but I can still find the articles I’m looking for as well as the amusing ephemera.
February 7th, 2006 at 12:17 am
But don’t the newspaper databases only bring up the article rather than a full page image? Maybe I need to revisit the newspaper databases. Are you talking about the NY Times, LA Times ones through the library?
February 7th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
I think it depends on the article. I’m fairly sure that some of the Post articles if they were able to scan it up the page is there, but if not then just the text is…