readings week 3
Although I still have questions about some of the terms used in the reading this week, overall I found the reading for this week to be very helpful and informative. I was thought the discussion of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) versus typing was very interesting. Never would I have imagined that having a professional typist retype a document would be more accurate than OCR. Of course it is more complicated than that, as Cohen and Rosenzweig recommend typing over OCR mostly for smaller projects (mainly due to costs). I also was amazed that some sites, such as J-STOR do not correct any errors found in machine readable text document. Rather they have that version and then have a scanned version available without any errors. Not only did I think this was interesting, but I wondered are people aware of the different options available to them on databases such as J-STOR? Do people actually cut and past from the machine readable text files? I do not. I will usually skim through the article and then decide if I want to print it out. So this made me think of a more general question. I imagine databases and websties sometimes find that visitors use the site differently than from what it was originally intended? Should they then try to alter the site to better serve visitors? Should certain features of a database or website be removed if they are not being frequently used?
I guess this is sort of an ethical question. The outsourcing of jobs to other countries has been one of the more important issues in the United States in recent years. As the chapter points out, there is a big difference paying workers competitive wages in the United States to complete parts of or the whole digitization process. Compared to sending the work to foreign countries that pay workers two dollars an hour. I was sort of surprised by this. For when you usually when we think of outsourcing we think of large corporations and particularly the auto industry. I really got a kick out of the Ford Motor Co. commercial during the Super Bowl, which had one member of the family talking about the future of the company being “innovation”. Of course this was aired just weeks after the company announced it will be cutting 30,000 jobs. With this in mind and seeing how most people working in the field of history are mindful of such as outsourcing. Is it right to send a job overseas, when you know the people making the product are not getting paid what they should be? Should you also be mindful that this may be costing Americans jobs? Or should keeping the project to as low a cost as possible be the determining factor?
February 7th, 2006 at 11:28 am
I found the discussion on outsourcing interesting as well. You are rght one does not usullay associate such social issues with the discipline of history. It got me to thinking about how the outsourcing of digitization puts some individuals at the center of a controversial aspect or our naitons social history. I am not sure what this means, but it is interesting nonetheless.
February 7th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Outsourcing was something I also found interesting. The issue is, and not to get into a political discussion–is that we live in a capitalistic environment and if we want the resources and the ability to gain cheap stuff (i.e. Walmart etc)….you have to go outside….otherwise, everyone will begin complaining about how things like DVD’s and electronics are so expensive.
Also–and having seen the direct effect of outsourcing on a lot of friends and family–even though the pay is less compared to how much they pay Indians, its still a lot of money in Rupee’s and allows young Indians the ability to actually participate in the global market when they have such a higher level of competition then we have here…
I know it sucks for Americans, but what’s the alternative? No one seems to be able to provide an adequate one and I suppose for historical socieites without resources the best way to get accessibility for people to use your materials is to get the job done and quickly, accurately and cheaply as possible…
Anyway….sorry about that. I also found the OCR discussion really interesting.
February 7th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
While an ethical question in many regards, it also depends on the scope of the dilemma. Certainly many nations that have been recently in the duldrums have been jumped into great economic prosperity. Ireland is the best example I can think of. Ireland is now in the top 3 EU nations in per capita income, and Dublin is the second (maybe first now) most expensive city for tourists.