The Confluence of Digital Media and History

In my work I've begun to investigate new work space tools that can help my developers and I keep a running list of prioritized items within our proprietary systems. We're looking into platforms through  JIRA software  and others to help this communication and workflow. I was astounded at the number of options available (and their prices)! Digital tools are certainly a booming industry.  Of the many digital tools listed in this unit, I've used a few: The Internet Archive: Wayback Machine  is helpful for both personal and work related projects.  Dropbox is an excellent way to share and store large files.  My family has a running Wunderlist of to-dos and ideas. Prezi was helpful throughout college and has applications for the workplace, if time allows. Google Docs and Sheets help me share ideas and data with family and friends, and has been integral in planning my wedding and honeymoon.  The above are what easily come to mind, but I know othe...

This chapter from Rosenzweig is perhaps the most compelling yet, at least to me. I am looking to pursue a master's in library science with a focus on archiving, and probably digital archiving at that. The discussions about how perilous the integrity and accessibility of digital collections are in this week's chapter struck home.  It's startling to read that "the foremost American authority on the longevity of various media, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), still cannot give a precise timeline for the deterioration of many of the formats we currently rely on to store precious digital records." So much of the personal records we care about and rely on are stored in computers and on servers. If I lost my computer and online data storage, I would be losing a significant amount of important documents and personal photos. On the flip side, I wouldn't print out every document and photo either. It will be interesting to see where digital ar...

For the data visualization project, I pulled information about population in counties of Virginia from 1790-2000 from the National Historical Geographic Information System  (NHGIS). I narrowed my data visualization down from every county in Virginia to those in what I would consider Northern Virginia. Many of the counties, including Alexandria and Prince William, did not have sufficient data to make meaningful entries in the chart. I chose to capture 1900-2000, as opposed to 1800-1900, because of the amount of information available. I found this project very challenging, both in terms of finding the data set, and in formatting the above chart using Google Charts . The search functionality in the NHGIS system was not intuitive and the sheer breadth of information available was overwhelming. I pulled several sets of data before deciding on county population changes. It is easy to see a far and away change in Fairfax County, which in 2000 was at a whoppi...

I submitted 5 photos to the Northern Virginia Digital History Archive , mostly photos of the weather, including two from the snow storm in January 2016. In looking through my photos from the past five years or so, I was surprised to find that I didn't have many of local landmarks or historical places in Northern Virginia. Therefore, I've contributed mostly photos of inclement weather, of which I apparently have a few.  For the record, it appears I submitted the first entry for the Leesburg collection!  The Northern Virginia Digital History Archive is easy to browse through, though a little more cumbersome to include contributions. The descriptions above each free text box could be more explanatory to encourage contributors to follow a uniform writing style. I was expecting to classify my photos in each of the collections it pertains to, but that must be done during the administrator approval. As the collection grows, user tagging might be an easier way to order ...

I haven’t really thought about the intersection of physical reality and digital reality before. Perhaps because I grew up with computers (albeit floppy-disk reading computers) in classrooms, I’ve become accustomed to the digital reality / reality dichotomy. When using the examples of Persepolis or 1544 Edinburgh , it’s easy to see these places as now wholly digital, because they no longer exist in reality. But when you consider a print article vs. an online article or an ebook vs. the print copy, the line begins to blur. What came first, the chicken or the egg? And which is more important historically? In this unit the focus is on reality within the digital realm, but after some research I’ve become more interested in the idea of the digital realm coming out into reality. There’s an interesting article from The Atlantic that discusses just that -- “ We Need a Word for That Thing Where a Digital Thing Appears in the Physical World .” The article brings a really interesting points to l...

Over the weekend I played with both Prezi and ARCGIS to determine which platform would be best for my story map. Long story short, I'll be using ARCGIS. In Prezi I’d need many more images within the presentation itself to provide the same level of detail already built into ARCGIS. Within my story map I'll be using the ARCGIS journal builder to display information on each installation site. Using the Virginia WWI and WWII Commemoration Commission  and the Library of Virginia’s “Guide to the Virginia War History Commission, Records, 1915-1931”  websites, I was able to identify the installations operating or founded between 1914 and 1918, 20 in all: Northern Virginia: Camp A.A. Humphreys (now Belvoir)  Front Royal Remount Station Camp Bally Camp Lee (now Fort Lee) Coastal Virginia: Camp Eustis on Mulberry Island near Newport News (combined with Langley in 2010) Camp Alexander Camp Casino (Newport News) Camp Hill Camp Morrison Camp Stuart Fort M...