Susan's Digital History Blog

I had a lot of fun playing with Scratch, but I have to say that I am confused as to what possible application it would have for historians. I think the sprite doing tasks could be adapted pretty easily to help teach things to children but most historical research and websites are not geared toward educating children. The computer programming aspect of it is very fun and interesting, and it is always good to learn new things, but I guess I just don’t get it as a tool for historians!

My Scratch practice:

practice

In Roy Rosenzweig’s Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, he raises many thought provoking issues about digital archiving. I think the entire article can be summarized by his statement that “historians ignore the future of digital data at their own peril.”

He points out that “linking directly from footnotes to electronic texts–an exciting prospect for scholars–will only be possible if a stable archiving system emerges.” It is scary to think that what we take for granted today might not be available 10 years from now just because technology will continue to grow.

This particularly hit home to me when he mentioned the word processing programs of the ’80s and obsolete storage devices. I took WordPerfect in my former scholastic life. Do my fellow students today have any idea what WordPerfect means? I seriously doubt it (not that forgetting WordPerfect is a bad thing…Lord knows, I try to forget it!). I also still have (though I have no earthly idea why) boxes of floppys and disks that are obsolete and unreadable because there is no way of inserting them into a computer, let alone reading the information on them even if you could figure out how to load them on the computer.

Even Word documents can fall into this black whole zone. With each new release of Microsoft Office, an older version becomes obsolete. What happens to those Word documents I created ten years ago? Even if I managed to keep them on a storage device that my computer can read, can I still even open those documents? That’s a scary thought. It often takes years to research a topic before one can begin to write a paper. It then often takes years to get that paper published. What happens to all those notes that were written 10 years ago? Will an historian be able to access those notes if he or she is asked to update his or her paper? It is truly sobering to consider.

Added to this problem is that the average person could dutifully be backing up to hard drives, flash-drives, and sky-drives all for naught! Will those drives be accessible 10 or 20 years from now? Should we also print out all our information and store it in file boxes in the attic?

I have to admit that I hadn’t really thought of all those issues he raised. But I’m thinking about them now. Hopefully, others are too. Or we are all out of luck.

Item of interest:  Front page of the Business Section of Sunday’s Washington Post: Ducking Google in search engines.  An interesting article about search engines featuring DuckDuckGo.

When reading From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections by Dr Dan Cohen, I have to admit that a lot of the technical talk was all babel to me –at first. As I read on, and slowly began to understand what this work with APIs can open up, my mind was overwhelmed with the possibilities. I thought, “Aha! This will help me with my project!” and impatiently finished reading so that I could explore the links we were given. Though I played around quite a bit with TIME Magazine Corpus and Google Ngram Viewer, I didn’t find anything I could use. Of course my topic is very current so it is not likely to be in books and magazines yet.

Despite striking out on my initial attempts, I plan to refine my search attempts, just to see what I can find.   The internet is so vast that retrieving useful research information often seems to me to be about as easy as finding a specific star in the night sky.  You know it’s there somewhere but you have to know where to look and have the right tools to find it.   APIs ease  those requirements a bit by making it easier to ask the right question and thereby find the right answer.

On the surface, that formula would seem to describe a simple Google search as well, but it’s not exactly the same.  A Google search gives you the most searched sites, which is not necessarily where you will find the right, or even the best, answer to your research question.  If you want to know the date Nationals Park opened, sure, just Google away.  But if you want to know the impact Nationals Park had on the surrounding area…not so much.  Google will give me the sites that most people go to for information on Nationals Park, like the Washington Nationals website and a host of ticket selling sites.  When researching a deeper topic, Google is like a map that tells you which way the majority of people turned at a specific corner.  Just because the majority of people turned right does not mean that is the best or even the correct way to get there.   By comparison, APIs give you the ability to search in a manner that will give you a much more precise answer.   That type of search shows you every possible way to get to Nationals Park and lets you decide which route you will take.

I can only imagine where this can go and how it will change historical research, which is really not interested in going down the same path as everyone else but is much more interested in taking the side roads to see what it can see.

Edward Tufte’s PowerPoint is Evil  seems a little harsh but I do think he has a point, though I disagree with him implying that PowerPoint is to blame–human nature is. The tool is only as good as the person using it. PowerPoint is a fantastic tool, when used correctly. Even Tufte points out, “PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.”
Somewhere along the way we decided that everything must fit into a sound bite, and that the average person just doesn’t want to hear (or is incapable of staying focused on) a speech about anything.  Speeches became about talking points, not about effective communication. Too many people try to fit every situation into a PowerPoint and don’t take the time to look at the material and to actually think about the best way to present it.  The Gettysburg PowerPoint is a perfect (though admittedly extreme) example of what can happen when the user fails to analyze the audience and the purpose of the talk he or she is given. We’ve all been to these “Gettysburg PowerPoint” type of presentations. Something that could have been relayed in a matter of minutes in a concise speech is stretched into a 20 minute PowerPoint presentation that leaves us completely confused about why we were there in the first place. That is user error and, frankly, laziness on the part of the one giving the talk.
“I’ll whip up a PowerPoint on that” has become a standard mantra in the workplace. Sure, PowerPoint has made it easy to produce snazzy slides, but I’m old enough to remember people saying they’d “whip up an overhead” with the same off-hand nonchalance. It’s that nonchalance that is the problem.