The Confluence of Digital Media and History

The final project is complete! It can be accessed here: https://arcg.is/1fqGDn I chose not to embed the presentation within my site because it was cramping the width of the text and maps.  Much time and work has gone into this presentation, I hope you enjoy!

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...

When looking for digital sources for class and personal projects, I often go to YouTube for video and Flickr or Creative Commons for photos. I also use personal photographs for projects as well, because I find it often easier to just take a picture of something and email it to myself.  A great example of that would be museum artifacts. Throughout the certificate program I’ve visited and critiqued museums. Often my in-class presentations will be a combination of images pulled from the museum’s website in conjunction with my own photographs taken via iPhone. These local museums may not have high resolution images on their websites of the artifacts or foibles I’d like to highlight and it can be easier to get physically closer to the artifact for clarity, then take a picture.  A personal archiving adventure I’ve dabbled in digital archiving with my mom, transferring photos and home videos into DVDs or digital files. My mother’s side of the family has amassed an impressive amou...

Reading Rosenzweig's chapter on copyright helped frame the world of copyright law in a succinct and meaningful way. I see now that there are grey areas to copyright, especially when the idea of fair use is thrown into the mix. As some of my former classmates may know, I have a general interest in the law and spent a year in law school before deciding the study of law was more a hobby than a profession, so I found this information very interesting. I also found the video, A Fair(y) Use Tale , entertaining and informative. Having read Rosenzweig's chapter first, I still balked at the use of Disney's opening in the video, even with the disclaimer. Having grown up in the late 80's and 90s, I remember seeing the FBI warning before movies (on VHS) and knowing that it was illegal to copy a movie and resell it. Later in life, however, I've only been exposed to copyright concerns from an academic perspective; I don't deal commercially with copyright issues at work. D...

For my final project, I'd like to create a story map. Initially I was floundering on what exactly I would represent, but I've since latched on to one of Professor Evans' ideas, a map of WWI military installations in Virginia. As a military brat, I have a special affinity for military installations, having lived on them the first 18 years of my life. I've done some research into the actual sites of the installations ( here and here seem like good places to start), but have spent more time deciding which platform to use to create my story map. During college I became adept at using Prezi, and consider that platform a contender for this project. In the below video you can see some of the ways in which Prezi can be used to create a story map -- and it has the added ability to make things look visually complex in layers of text and graphics. Of course I've also been looking into what ArcGIS can offer -- the gallery is a particularly useful place to start. The ...

The chapters out of this unit were especially helpful for editing the design of my blog. In the past several units I've struggled with editing the text in a post so that it will show up as intended. Often while writing in Blogger I'll have to "preview" a post multiple times to create a successful post. Using the "compose" functionality of Blogger can be more trouble than it's worth, so I've tried switching between the HTML and compose functions with some success. Once I've completed a post, I then have to change the font to white and highlight to black to create the correct contrast in the blog. If not, the results are less than satisfactory:  Initially I chose the black background and white text color scheme for greater contrast, but in the process I limited my creative options. To update my blog for this unit, I've decided to: Change the color theme to remove the need to edit the color of text Include color images as...

In chronological order from earliest to most recent, I believe the website order should be something like the below:  The Avalon Project American Memory   Dickinson Electronic Archive   Romantic Circles Amiens Cathedral Project Persepolis: A Virtual Reconstruction   Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Hawthorne in Salem The April 16 Archive   In Our Path   Digital Karnak Eye Level Life Outtacontext Oyez   Lascaux Part of the issue of chronologically sorting websites by their overall look -- some of the older looking ones were created more recently! For example, the Avalon Project website lists a copyright of 2008. The website doesn't have some of the main aspects we've come to expect in websites today (clean design, useful navigation, seamless interactivity) because the website was built for a single purpose -- to house transcripts of documents relating to law, history and diplomacy, beginning around 4000 BCE. As was discussed...

In searching on Google for a wide range of history blogs to compare and contrast, I first noticed that the search “history blogs” would get me nowhere. As mentioned in the last reading, there are so many blogs on the internet today that finding a credible authority on a specific topic can take some serious digging. Another issue with the world of blogs – how best to distinguish which are truly active? In searching I’ve found several that I would read, only to find out that they stopped posting abruptly several years ago. Depending on the audience, it is conceivable that a person could stop posting one day if only their mother and next door neighbor’s cat were avid readers. The size of the audience could also dictate the amount of effort an author is willing to put into posts. If the poster isn’t relying on the blog for monetary gain or fame, it would be much easier to pack it up when it got boring. I am interested in a wide range of historical topics, but most often local history ...

The Rosenzweig reading provided a wealth of information, especially for an introduction, but I found the information very useful as a framework for the book and for this class. Several points stuck out to me while reading, first and foremost the "seven qualities of digital media and networks that potentially allow us to do things better: capacity, accessibility, flexibility, diversity, manipulability, interactivity, and hypertextuality (or nonlinearity)." Of these seven, capacity, accessibility, and interactivity were the most interesting to me. I enjoyed the questions posed in the capacity section -- "why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?" There is an overwhelming amount of information on the web today, as well as data stored about our daily moves and actions. What will this information mean to future historians? It seems to me t...