The Confluence of Digital Media and History

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...