Digital Preservation

So I guess copyright is a discussion for next week, my mistake.

In Preserving Digital History Cohen and Rosenzweig give us the doom and gloom to digital preservation.  I think they are over-analyzing the situation a bit.  For instance if you are constantly developing and creating content for your website, you should be in tune with the changes in formats and standards in order to keep your website in working order.  I guess I differ from C & R a bit after that, I believe if you are no longer able to keep your web resource updated (financially or otherwise) it should be your responsibility to take that resource down.  This practice will make those that are still up a better, since the user will not be constantly wondering what will and will not work (I'm sure we've all been to websites where about half of the content is still live).

Speaking of preservation, the Utah Digital Newspaper project as described by Herbert and Estlund provides a great look into the inter workings of a large scale digitization effort.  Herbert and Estlund take time to explain the perils of digitization and the time it takes to create these records.  The Utah Digital Newspaper project uses OCR for the text of the articles, but enters in the headlines and sub headlines manually to preserve 100 per cent accuracy (which is a fallacy but we'll let them dream) with headlines.  The work being done by the Utah Digital Newspaper project sets a great example, which hopefully other states will follow.

Cohen and Rosenzweig also discuss crowd sourcing, here they go back to using the online communities you have developed to create a more user friendly content area.  I have a few examples of this in history sites, bear with me.  When we look at Old Weather there are transcription options for users to transcribe the original records of the past.  If you look at the transcription pages, you will find that the transcribers (or indexers) are not meeting the need of the project.  This project is dated at the bottom as 2012, hopefully it is new to the game and only getting started.  Looking at another project, the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania uses a mobile platform called The O to curate their collection for the visitors.  Using The O users vote on the art they enjoy weather they love or hate that specific work of art.  This crowd sourcing option has worked very well and has provided the Museum of Old and New Art with some valuable feedback on their collection.  One final example of crowd sourcing is a glimpse into the future.  As more and more records are digitized at the Washington State Digital Archive we have an increased need for indexing (or transcribing) our records to create metadata.  Unfortunately our budget is what it is, so we are putting the finishing touches on a system called Scribe, in which volunteers and employees can index our records.  As we have seen with Old Weather, and is talked about in Cohen and Rosenzweig, the key to making Scribe a success will be getting the public interested and willing to participate.

Copyright and History, and the Library of Congress

Today I'd like to start by looking at the world of copyright through the lens of digital historians.  Copyright, so the government would like to tell us, protects our ideas form being copied by others.  For historians this poses a problem.  As we are not able to post anything containing copyright except from Public Domain, Creative commons or General Public License resources.  This problem, for historians, was essentially created in 1976 when copyright transformed form 28 years total to essentially 70 years after ones death.  The whole transformation of copyright is covered very well in Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History Chapter Owning the Past?  Cohen and Rosenzweig create a table which is an essential resource for digital historians explaining which items are inside and outside of copyright. Essentially any text created after 1923, with some exceptions are under copyright.  This gets worse when looking at different mediums, which the digital historian would like to use.  For instance there is essentially no public domain for music or film.  This conundrum puts many contemporary digital historians in a conundrum.

Wrestling, 1950-1970, Department of Corrections, McNeil Island Corrections Center Photograph Collection, 1855-2010, Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.wa.gov, 10/27/2012. 

Certain online repositories allow use of their images, the Washington State Digital Archives being one of them.

In the above image I would like to name the wrestler on top Copyright and the poor chap underneath Digital Historian.  As you can see things haven't gone the way the Digital Historian was hoping, copyright is winning.  However as Cohen and Rosenzweig explain Copyright is capable of moving and changing, with any luck Digital Historian will find his way out from underneath Copyright, even though his chances do not look very bright at the moment.

The Library of Congress websites are not nearly as exciting as I believe they could be.  However the addition of myLOC is a great step in the right direction.  MyLOC allows researchers, students, teachers and the general public to save what they are looking for for further review.  The Library of Congress hosts videos as well as photos and text.  Unfortunately their videos seem to be of lectures regarding specific actions or collections and as you might imagine tend to be dry as salt, kudos to anyone who doesn't turn this off within 25 seconds.  However the LOC is working in the right direction, for instance their collection highlights are well thought out and offer great access to holdings in their collection that would require visiting the LOC, which in many cases in impossible or impracticable.  I particularly enjoyed the Maps collection with 11638 maps available for research.

Google Historical

In the readings this week I found the discussion of the behemoth Google to be one of the major themes.  The Google Books service came especially under fire.  I believe one of the major problems with this service is that everyone seems to want or expect something different out of it.  For instance Cohen argues that the Google Books cannon should be freely downloadable, focusing on the metadata or searchable text of the books.  Unfortunately Cohen didn’t explain why he wanted to do this, perhaps for data mining, I could not come up with a valid reason why this was necessary when Google Books are available online 24/7.  Nunberg argues that Google Books is destroying scholarship by having some faulty links and metadata reporting false information, such as publication dates.  I respond to Nunberg without sympathy, I believe using Google Books is no different than using other academic sources, you must always evaluate the validity of the source.  For instance if you are reading a Google Book about the Berlin Wall written in 1881, it is reasonable to believe that the indexing on Google interpreted an 8 instead of a 9 making the work written in 1981.  This type of obvious correction and identification is something that historians should be trained to do in paper or physical sources.  The transition to digital world does not mean to leave the analytical skills behind and trust the cloud.  Carr comes on strong arguing that Google in general, not merely Google Books, is making us [humans] lose our patience for reading and our reading skills generally.  Carr concludes, “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”  I couldn’t disagree more.  I believe that with sources of information becoming more easily accessible people are forced to rely on their digital skills to look up information and anylize it rather than simply accept it as truth.  One of the things I found out from these readings on Google was that we cannot simply rely on Google to give us the answers, we must solicit Google’s help in our quest to find the truth but accept that we cannot rely on Google to give us the truth.

Speaking of finding truth, many great sources this week for using Google.  My favorite was the infographic regarding Google search.  I suggest playing A Google A day to help keep your Googling skills sharp!

The digital history projects for the week, Cleveland, Spokane and New Orleans Historical websites.  These sites are loaded with information from students from the prospective cities which have worked to provide text, photographs, and sometimes audio and video to interpret each “stop.”  The websites are laid out well, I believe Cohen and Rosenzweig would agree that the information is well organized and easy to read.  However I got the feeling that the sites were not well marketed.  Cohen and Rosenzweig talk about driving traffic through links to and from other websites here:

“In particular, try to get links from respected or prominent sites. Your site’s ranking will benefit much more from a link provided by the highly linked (and highly ranked) Library of Congress website than from your cousin’s personal home page.” (Building an Audience, Mass Marketing, Online and Off, Near the Bottom of this website)

If the City Historical websites used this principle, linking to and from other cultural institutions in their area, perhaps it would drive use.

In conclusion this week was built upon using digital skills and interpreting their results.  I believe it is important to understand these results and to interpret them before blindly accepting the results as fact or truth.  

10/22 Addendum:
In searching the 250+ digital history sites I came across this gem and this failure.  Both are from Maine and are examples of digital history websites.  The gem is great because it not only fosters interaction but also has lots of rich content in a design that works well.  The failure is a product of a website not being kept up over time, videos don't play, and shows us the plight of old websites, c'mon if it is not being maintained take it down folks.

Open Source Digital History

My readings for this week have largely focused on creation of digital content for use in digital history projects.  One of the most important parts of this, I believe, is the idea of open sourced history.  In history many people do not feel that the term 'open source' applies, after all I did the research for my scholarly article and I should be able to charge what the market will provide for that.  Spiro points out that open sourced journals can be powerful things since they do not have to charge as much, or perhaps anything, to the readers.  This savings will decrease in profit for the author (which can't be much) and has the possibility to substantially increase the readership of the article.

Open source has greater impact in Digital Humanities rather than simply publication.  Open sourced digital history tools being developed have created free resources for historians to use in their work.  This allows historians to focus on what they know best, the content of their digital history projects.  The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is a prime example of an institution creating a suite of resources to make digital history projects better.

Reading both Spiro and Cohen and Rosenberg's Digital History, the amount of variation in the files and way that history is presented is astounding.  With the rise of open source, I believe Digital Historians must convene and decide on standards as well.  For instance, image scans for digital history projects will be in .tif format and no larger than X MB for viewing inside of a webpage, with a downloadable option to download the full resolution image.  The acceptance of certain standards for digital history projects will yield less confusion when using various digital history projects.

I know people are reluctant to abide by another set of rules that they did not create, however I believe this is necessary, especially when looking at the myriad of different digital history projects, listed at the CHNM, VCDH, Nebraska Center for Digital Research and the MITH.  I believe standards for elements within these digital exhibits would create cohesion without having the webpages look like they were simply altered templates (which I believe is what people fear).

Lastly open sources and standards raise the ability of what a digital historian can do on their own, without spending years studying computer science and other factors involved in how everything works.  Open source projects such as Omeka have done wonders in terms of increasing web page creation tools and accessibility to the moderately computer savvy historians.

Digital History

What is digital history?  I would contend that digital history is simply the portrayal of historic information in a digital form.  To me, digital history is online, intuitive, interactive and open to interpretation.  I recently read an article here in which career academics discussed digital history, available here.  I do not believe digital history needs to be a topic of such debate (and length).  Digital history should take advantages over print media and other ‘traditional’ historical sources to create an intuitive and interactive experience for the user.

Digital history cannot replace the experience found in many historic venues and places.  For example, in 2007 when I visited Auschwitz there was no digital tour (that I was aware of).  In this example, the pure power of place and artifact did not need amplification by digital media or augmentation.  The personal tour recounting the terror inflicted on the human race, served as a reminder to us all of the horrors of unbridled power.

Looking at this photo online does not give the user the same experience as being there first hand.

Another place where digital history could not augment the physical reality, is the Vietnam Memorial, in the National Mall in Washington D.C.  If you are at this simple, elegant memorial and feel the power of those names in the rock, it does more than looking at this picture:

Photo curtosey of tom.arthur - www.flickr.com

This is not to say that digital history cannot be useful to augment many different experiences.  For instance a QR code at a historic overlook explaining what it looked like (in an audio or video file) when explorers first looked at the valley could be useful and far more efficient than hiring someone to stand at a historic overlook and talk to whoever happens to stop the car.  

Digital history has a use, and should be engaging and interactive.  Archives and institutions across the world are beginning to understand what this interaction can be and how they can use it to the best of their ability to make sure that the digital history experience adds to rather than subtracts from the physical experience that comes with historic artifacts and places.