suckow

See attached Word file for the review.677 Web review.doc

This week’s readings were quite enjoyable, especially the Gettysburg Address Powerpoint parody. While I am very much in favor of using visual aids and digital assistance to add some attention-getters to presentations, they can be a stong cue on which the audience can hang the memory of what was said. Relying on any form of digital assistance for the bulk of the presentation, though, can become a distraction from the actual content of the presentation. The use of Powerpoint particularly has always struck me as at best an annoyance and at worst a stumbling block to understanding. Partly because way too many presenters just read the bullet points and add nothing useful. Mainly, though, the listeners then pitch their notetaking and attention to what is on the slides and not on what the presenter is saying, which is especially a problem in course lectures. Most of the context, and sometimes the really important data then gets lost to the listeners.

Furthermore, for the archivist and the historian, Powerpoint creates another problem. At times, the only historical record for a critical meeting for some purpose may be the Powerpoint presentation. The document itself is often of little use in reconstructing the meeting, even to the extent of knowing what the speaker actually said, and provides no means of determining the context for the limited amount of information present. Few of what are often referred to as “the journalist’s questions,” especially those of how and why, can be answered by the Powerpoint document. This problem is no exaggeration, as I have dealt with it in practice in the process of creating a finding aid for a document collection. In fact, one which involved the slide example from page 27 of the Tufte article.

Here is my attempt at a website around the image I uploaded to the blog previously. Nothing incredible. Columbia image webpage

There is a definite balancing act to make a good historical website. It is worthwhile to spend a decent amount of time on the “bells and whistles” in order to keep one’s page from being classified as on a par with personal pages. People do tend to equate slick pages with professionalism and reliable info unless it is obviously otherwise. Yet, on a project where the budget is minimal and the time is short, that is the area which will have to get shorted if the website is going to go up in useful form.

In terms of multimedia on websites, from the time Rosenzweig and Cohen wrote their book, Quicktime and RealPlayer have definitely taken over from Windows Media Player. Media Player is used by only a minority of sites. For audio, Quicktime seems to be the real favorite, and there are a number of long (hour plus) interviews available on a variety of sites for download or streaming through Quicktime. This could be a very interesting oral history collecting project, even if not on the scale of the Sonic Memorial Project, one could make the original interviews available as well as the transcripts, allowing others to catch the nuances which do not show up as well in the written form.

One thing which I wondered, and which Rosenzweig and Cohen did not touch on, was whether it was possible to convert between multimedia formats such as Quicktime or Media Player. It would make sense to have all the media on a site be the same, but if one is pulling it from online sources which use different players, it would be a real pain to require people to download two players in order to view everything on a site.

Lastly, the great computer graphic design question, Macs or PCs? Or does it not matter for history sites, where the focus is not on making the look of the site “top of the line”?

Since we only have the one reading this week, I thought I’d post a very strange coincidence I ran across while doing the web review for my collecting project. There was an article on a space news website the day before the 2003 Challenger anniversary, which is coincidently the date of the Apollo 1 accident, about the Columbia (the fatal flight) crew’s plans, or lack thereof, for the Challenger anniversary.

For the original post I am responding to see http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/staff/josh/courses/AU377/students/boyle. The techies vs. preservation dichotomy is somewhat of a false one. While techies are out to create the “next big thing,” one of the more important next big things are devices which can store more data and be more stable in that storage over the long term. People in general, not just historians, want to know that their documents will still be around when they need them without having been corrupted in the meantime. Furthermore, they want to be able to save as much as they will need without having to get rid of something important due to lack of storage space. That drive for greater storage and stability is in essence a drive for preservation by means of new technology. So, there is a progression from storage just on floppies to harddrives and floppies to CDs and DVDs to key drives and on and on, all looking to preserve more data in a more stable way. Furthermore, digital data is frozen, or preserved if you will, in a way that analog data is not. The digital data will be exactly the same 100 copies down the line. Whereas, both the analog original and the copies will deteriorate the more that copies are made. The desire by techies to create storage media which is less easily corrupted is an attempt to further ensure data will be frozen or preserved for longer periods. Obviously, as noted by our readings, there is and probably will never be a perfect method especially for those who are under a budget. After all, not all historians or groups can afford argon gas storage for ion beam created nickel disks. But what is now available can buy more time to deal with the problem of digital preservation.

Could not get it uploaded yesterday. Apologies for any confusion.

I rather enjoyed the Hedstrom article, http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom/html. Something not mentioned is a newer problem with digital preservation which results from the prevalence of email. When business was conducted primarily by paper memo, effort was made to state the whole case in one shot, which keeps down the amount of relevant paper to be archived. With emails however, multiple exchanges now take place where before there might have been as little as two, drastically increasing the amount of historically relevant material. All of which need to be preserved and kept in useable format. For example, I can no longer recall where I read it, NARA has to deal with archiving and sifting through for historical relevance literally millions of emails from the last couple presidential administrations.

I intend to use the object on the collecting project website for this class, either somewhere on the main page or in the images pages. I scanned the image with Photoshop as a jpg at 300 dpi. I chose this particular way of doing it because, for one, jpg files are fairly standard and offer a good balance of detail and ease of download. I scanned at 300 dpi in order to make the image of print quality in case someone should choose to use it for that purpose off the site and also to be small enough to fit a standard sized monitor. It should still be able to be downsampled for a lower res version for the main images page as well. I did not do an archival quality image because I know of at least six brick and mortar archives which have the image. It is also commercially available in print, so there is no worry that the image will be lost. It is however, essentially a requisite image for any site on the topic of the accidents and it beats copying a 72 dpi photo elsewhere on the Net.

Digitization is one of the prime reasons I am taking this class, the other being web design, and so the reading was quite interesting. However, there were a few points it missed and I wanted to bring up. To get the negative out of the way, an issue with digitizing documents, at least in terms of page scanning, is illegitability. One needs to be careful to check that after scanning the document can be read. Sometimes in scans of older typed manuscripts, the ink has bled to the point where the letters cannot be discerned even under large magnification. Whether this is a problem of the scan or an illegible original document, I do not know, but it is something to watch out for when doing a digitization project.

Moving on to images, the reading discussed a few different means of presenting digital images such as compressed TIFFs or providing only higher res images on request, see http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/digitizing/5.php. Another way to present images is to place low res or thumbnail images on a main page and then text links to higher res versions of the images. This allows one to have a faster loading main images page while at the same time providing higher res images on the site. It means a bit more effort in page design as each higher res version must be given a page, but over the long haul it allows more people to access and download the higher res versions without requiring the extra work for the webmaster of answering requests.

Lastly, sound. There is a means of transferring sound on the cheap not mentioned in the reading. All one needs is obtain a media capture program, there are excellent freeware options available for download off the Net. Then hook the player into the mic input of a computer, using a male-male connector that fits the jacks on the player and the mic input, and play the sound media. The sound does lose a little quality in the transition, but if you need it done period and have not got the money for other options, it is quite workable. Cost is just that of the player and the connector (which is easy to find in stores that sell audio equipment and costs about $10). I found all this out while working on converting my tape collection to mp3s, not for p2p filesharing, but so I keep all the music and can quit worrying that the walkman is going to eat something irreplacable.