Post 2
While reading the first reading, a question arose regarding the preservation of materials for the future. While creating materials for data preservation, one has to keep in mind the ever-changing norms of formats. Should we keep original documents in their original form with hopes that further down the technological timeline we can find more effective and longer lasting formats, or should we continue to update the documents to the current format, taking time, money and resources each attempt to update the data to the present?
Regarding the second reading, I was surprised that historians use machines to organize the data off websites instead of viewing the data interactively. The future seems to be making interaction with the informational websites obsolete for historians. I question whether the money and technology to produce websites similar to The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War site is worth investing, while the main clientele, historians, respond by implementing technology to breakdown the websites to ascertain the basic data the website is attempting to display in a visually pleasing and attention grasping way?
Regarding the legitimacy of view responses in digital archive websites as accurate portrayals of the time range they originated. I relate this to the responses found on The Video Store Project. I worked at a video store for a few months during high school, it is interesting to read, and often times relate to the experiences of other video store workers. A response that reminded my of high school, where on the NYS Regents they would have you read accounts of different time periods written in dairy form or a format similar style. I always questioned whether they were real or simply created by the exam makers.
“Did you tend to rent or buy videos? Why?
rent… money issues… besides, my father soon got a second VCR and we figured out dubbing pretty quickly… so he’d rent movies, especially before a road trip, so we could watch the copies in the back of his new van with the new tiny tv and the “portable” vcr…. ahh the good old days before the stock market crash in ‘87!
During the period that you shopped at this store, what changes did you see?
they expanded… more than doubled in size overnight.
Is this store still open? If not, when did it close?
not open anymore… don’t know when it closed”
The responses in Regents exams always seemed to fit the time periods too well. But after reading the few questions in the response from The Video Store Project website (above) I can see how it can be used. I wonder how historians in the future will be able to decide which responses are accurate and which are purely false.
January 29th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Now that is a fascinating question–how will we be able to tell an accurate response from a false one…to some extent one has to hope that whatever topic is out there it is constructed in a way that only those most interested shall respond. But as we can tell from the Pearl Harbor website…regulation is a difficult thing to accomplish.
To be honest I don’t have a solution or an answer to your question. Rather I would suppliment the inquiry with one of my own–if you suspect a response to be trumped up, what does that say about data collection via the web, and its accuracy–and consequent impact on the historical narrative?
January 31st, 2006 at 1:18 am
I also had issues with the “accuracy” question. However, is this digital situation *that* different from what historians have always faced? When using diaries, letters, and even documents as sources, historians must evaluate the accuracy, biases, etc. of sources and cross-check information to ensure accuracy. With the proliferation of blogs and message boards it seems that the problem has simply gotten larger.