A Personal Exploration of Digital History

As some of you may remember (or will quickly find out when you go to check), I linked to an interesting video on the lifecycle of a Wikipedia article, particularly the one on the heavy metal Umlaut. For this week I will be using the standards outlined on this page to evaluate the Wikipedia page on Woodstock. Why this one? Well, a dear friend of mine brought up the point that people who say they actually remember Woodstock were probably not at Woodstock because there were drugs, man. Lots of drugs. Certainly this makes for an even more interesting evaluation.

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We’ve all heard it, whether we know it or not. The Amen Break, taken from the song “Amen Brother” by The Winstons, is a six second drum break that has been sampled and reincorporated in a multitude of songs and even commercials. The video embedded below, although somewhat lengthy, does a good job of showing both the variety of uses of the Amen Break and the issues associated with sampling of such iconic pieces of music history. Should the use of the Amen Break be more strictly regulated?

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Almost anyone who has gone through any sort of academic training requiring research knows that Wikipedia is the forbidden fruit of the internet. The voice of reason (your professor) makes a point of drilling the perils of Wikipedia use at the beginning of each year, and even beyond. However, if you have sunk your teeth into the myriad of pages Wikipedia has to offer, you might just find yourself tempted to reference them. While Wikipedia is not the best academic resource available, many are far to quick in dismissing its redeeming qualities.

A Quick Look into  the Lifecycle of Wikipedia Page

Before continuing this article, I would highly recommend taking a few moments out of your day to view this video by Jon Udell on the history of the Wikipedia page dedicated to the Heavy Metal Umlaut. From a few sentences to a full fledged article and beyond, Udell follows some key aspects of a Wikipedia article that change over time.

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The Technology Triathlon

How often do you use Google to find an answer to a question? Wikipedia? Bing? Ask.com? Yahoo search? What happens when the results simply fall short? In a society where running to a computer/smartphone/tablet for an immediate answer has become second nature, it is hard to fathom that this is not always the best option. Faced with finding the three items below, I was challenged to dig a little deeper, search a little smarter, and to blog by midnight. Here are my findings:

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Digitization: The Basic Methods and Formats

When it comes to taking the analog world and turning it digital, there are a multitude of factors that influence what materials and methods are used. Just as there are different formats for different papers based on their content, such as MLA and APA, there are even different file types that best suit particular digitization efforts. For example, there are multiple file formats for images, each with their own set of advantages and disadvantages:

• Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) – lower quality, faster to load, small file size
• Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) – decent quality, decent load time, medium file size
• Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) – high quality, slow to load, large file size

According to this 1965 article, authored by the American IT revolutionary T.H. Nelson, the future of writing with the aid of computers had very specific elements that would greatly aid the creative process. Nelson theorizes that using computers as a tool in writing could potentially cut down writing time by 50% for the same content, allows for easy changes in outlines, and (perhaps most prominently discussed in this article) features that allow strong associations between content in a way that allows access to all associated work to be much easier and faster.

The ELF and Modern Digital Composition

This last feature is coined the Evolutionary List File (or ELF), appropriately named due to its ability to be fluid and dynamic as the author of a work continues to mold and reshape his or her musings and revelations. This ELF can be broken down into three key pieces:

• Entries: In simple terms, and entry would be a defined piece of information or segment of writing entered in a digital format.
• Lists: The list contains entries that the author deems related in any order, which may be changed at any time or duplicated into an identical list which may then also be changed at any time.
• Links: The links combine the various links and entries to create a fluid experience when shifting from one subject to another closely related one. This is most closely aimed at Nelson’s desire to reduce writing time via cutting down on the time wasted attempting to search through various physical documents without an inherent link between any of them.

Though I was initially thrilled with the opportunity  to learn about the history of the Internet via this video, I soon found myself disappointed and quite a bit confused. For the more tech-savvy student, this overview may seem perfectly adequate. However, after several times watching the same eight minutes of video, I was left with one downright trivial concern: what the  in the hell is batch processing? My poor technology challenged brain was struggle very much with why something would be named batch processing if it only works on processing one task at a time.

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Just as with any other form of conveying information from one party to another, the new wave of digital communication and preservation has both advantages and disadvantages. For anyone who has ever spent more than a few minutes on a Wiki page of some sort, it is clear that information on the Internet has the potential to be either highly credible and informative or misleading and facetious. In some cases, tit is even possible to observe a blending of the two within the confines of a single paragraph. However, this sort of freedom in the sharing of information and ideas also provides a forum for discussion on less popular or more personal topics in a more peer-to-peer conversational format, or at least with more personal experience pertaining to the problems associated with everyday life, instead of just lofty ideas encased in elevated language. Is this aspect of the Internet an advantage or a disadvantage as we move forward with the use of the Internet as a source of historical information?

“Like postmodernism, the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other.”

[Quote in context found here.]

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Whether you have stumbled across this blog via some misguided Google search or actively sought it out, you have now officially found my blog. Congratulations! Now that you have made it past the first few sentences without frantically closing your browser, I would like to give you a little insight into what this project is all about. Who am I exactly? I am a new student at George Mason University preparing to embark on the next chapter of my life as a student. As part of this journey, I will be acquainting myself with the new and rapidly expanding field of digital history. This leads to the purpose of this blog: recording my personal relationship with this area of my studies. So whether you are a sadist wishing to watch me struggle or interested in a new twist on history, stay tuned as I join the realm of digital history in my own way.