A Personal Exploration of Digital History

Remember those fancy little Google Ngrams we were working on a few weeks ago? Here is a very interesting application I found right on the front page of my favorite webcomic, XKCD. I found it very interesting that September 11th far eclipses almost every major holiday in occurrences. Digging a little deeper into the rarely used logical side of my mind, I realized that this can be explained by some of the limitations of using Google’s Ngram viewer that we have been discussing. How often is a holiday going to be referenced in books since 2000 in the English language? Certainly not as often as one of the most major events of the 21st century that happened right after the beginning date for this search. In comparison, holidays are old news. Perhaps I can incorporate this sort of date analysis for whichever event I choose for my final project, which very well may be some aspect of the September 11th terrorist attacks given that I can narrow down the topic enough.

Feeling bored? Like mazes? Check out this neat little demonstration. While you may not pickup on it immediately, the purpose of getting “pegman,” who I have deemed Phillip (because, hey, why not?), through the maze is to work on your programing logic. Challenges include avoiding infinite loops and keeping it concise – something I certainly did not achieve in my attempt depicted below. While I wanted to come up with a method that would work even if I had randomized the maze to redirect the paths, I ended up with a long, highly specific set of directions. Turns out this is a lot more difficult than I thought!

Ever since I began my time as a student taking Digital Past, I couldn’t help but to be terrified at the apparently fragility of items stored digitally versus their traditional analog counterparts. This is the exact same fear that Dan Cohen explores in his online essay entitled “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” Even though the site used in this example is satirical in nature, I still even value this as an important clue to the public climate of the past. The fact that entire websites such as this one, even if they seem trivial on the surface, is absolutely an indicator of the challenges to come as the field of digital history continues to expand.

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For today’s post, I decided to take the same event and process through some of the various programs that have been brought up in discussion recently. Sticking with the theme of my PowerPoint from a few posts ago, I decided to continue my examination of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In particular, I decided to analyze this speech given by George W. Bush on the same day of the attacks. To begin, I created a “wordle” using the entirety of the speech with common American English words excluded, thus yielding the visualization seen below:

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One of the most striking pieces of insight I gained through reading this online essay, entitled From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections and authored by Dan Cohen, is the importance of which words are included and which are excluded both when executing a search and building search results. To give a bit of background information, Cohen’s task that he centered on in this article is the creation of a search engine for course syllabi that will consistently filter out other content to give a better grasp on what is being taught and how. In order to achieve this, Cohen relies on both exclusion and inclusion of certain words.

A “wordle” visualization showing common words in this very blog post.

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While the records assembled by Probing the Past, I came across the probate records of a man by the name of Benjamin Harrison of Charles City County, Virginia who passed away in 1791. I found his records to be interesting due to the fact that almost all of the items listed under his possessions were in fact  not items at all – they were all slaves. This large slave population at the hands of Harrison provides me the perfect opportunity to make point about how the same data can be portrayed and compared/contrasted in a variety of ways (even when using the same type of chart), all depending on what argument you are trying to make. Below, you will find 3 pie charts all generated from this single record:

Age

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This week’s task was to optimize the use of slideware program when given only 3 slides to cover one moment from history. As an American citizen born in the mid-1990s, one of the most significant historical events in my mind is the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 – exactly what I chose to focus my efforts on for this assignment. My goal here is not necessarily to provide all of the information about the attacks, but to simply combine first-hand observations in the form of quotes and a timeline of events. When it comes to wars and other historical events, we tend to think of them as drawn out – sometimes lasting years – but 9/11 truly changed international relations and the United States greatly in just a matter of hours. The aim here is to show how the impact of 9/11 was spread over such a short amount of time and how quickly it was realized that this would not be an easy event to recover from. Below, I will break down my presentation into individual slides but a full slideshow version can be found here.

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I went into the reading assignment this week expecting the fairly typical explanation of different ways of presenting digital media and a specific list of concerns. Instead, I got this (PowerPoint is Evil) and this (The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation). While both are humorous, they do make good points on how slideware programs more frequently than not create a presentation that is distracting, misleading, and even irrelevant. With all the talk how “how could we live without this?” few people actually consider what the actual answer to that question is.

Image used by Tufte to drive his points about PowerPoint home.

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