The Confluence of Digital Media and History

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...