“Reality” mining

Is privacy an just a recent anomaly, partially due to the now global nature of our “villages”?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html?em

Responses to critiques

Thanks for the comments during class and on the blog! I think the following items seemed like good suggestions to incorporate:

• RSS feed for updates and new exhibits
• Explaining research and specific sources on each display page
• Showing the academic research and background material on the general pages to appeal to scholars
• Annotated bibliography for additional information, rather than just a listing

Other suggestions that I need to contemplate more included:

• Color – white sets off the images vs any solid color for an enhanced palette
• Teaching section for educational usage – what grade levels would be appropriate and what lessons would students gain?

One final thought that I’d like to address: images and their cultural meanings/impact deserve historical attention because it shows the attitudes of the times when certain pictures gain immense popularity or different interpretations than what they show (science). This isn’t a political or economic topic, nor do certain “important” people need to be examined. Cultural history seems like the most relevant to explaining how ordinary people lived and absorbed the times they lived in. Images become especially important because more people appear to be visual learners and pick up information through images, which remains in their memory longer than the text or audio of any media story. I hope that this will be a fascinating website for the majority of visitors because it stimulates thought for everyone, rather than appealing to a certain audience interested in a particular topic.

News item about presidential e-mail

I saw this news item today about Obama’s addiction to his blackberry. Apparently, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush avoided email during their time in office because emails become archived and also FOIA-able (Freedom of Information Act). This means any personal emails to friends or family, as well as snarky comments about official business would enter the public domain. Therefore, they’ve chosen the privacy route to avoid embarrassment. Isn’t this sort of a backward step for the abundance of digital information? Shouldn’t we have rules to filter “private” out of the public domain and be able to get SOME emails? I may not be able to outline exactly all the aspects of what would be considered “private”, but some trial/error through preliminary guidelines could work over time, so at least there wouldn’t be a blackout. What do you think?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/17/obama.blackberry.ap/index.html?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail

Presentation

In-class presentation file

Searching and finding

One comment to get out of the way: did Peter Norvig think about what he would wear for this presentation? Or did he gain more respect as computer-geek-chic style? :-p

On a more serious note, his presentation seemed rather long and drawn out. I like presenters that have a few points, many examples, and an underlying theme/takeaway point. His takeaway point appeared to be the more data = better results. This makes sense… to a degree. I think historians understand holes in the data and write books trying to fill in the holes by extrapolating. The digital age brings an abundance of information, therefore difficulty in how to cover everything… Like the Victorian examples, how does the field deal with being rewritten continually from all this new, possibly circumstantial, information? While the modern age becomes an exciting time for the possibilities for research, I find it also worrying…

Text and data mining

Data mining seems like an interesting topic. It still requires search capabilities, tools, and time to find similar information… Readings the articles made me think of Wikipedia and Yahoo!Answers to consider how they’re different. I think Wikipedia and Yahoo!Answers depend on individuals and their expertise. For the user, information might be instant or take a few hours until someone responds. Data mining tools just depend on the available data sets online and the skill of the researcher in sorting through the information. Why am I thinking of this? Possibly because I like the fuzzier aspects of cultural history. The slavery site provides lots of good information from analyzing localities and attitudes, but I’ve never been much of a fan of historians that like trend charts and statistical analysis.

Website Mockups

Hmm… PowerPoint’s not that fun to work with for image sizes sometimes. I haven’t gotten an account to play with Omeka yet and did these with PowerPoint. More to be posted soon.

Updated mockups:

New Set of Mockups

I added in the additional inner pages for the website to the same PowerPoint file, rather than making each an individual file, especially since I’m not entirely sure how to embed the image into my blog rather than providing a file link.

To get around the copyright issue, I’m straying slightly away from direct news coverage to more ambiguous “meanings” of public domain NASA images. Sources may still come from the popular media, but I won’t be relying on them as primary sources and therefore shouldn’t be expected to reproduce them here. Instead, I’ve expanded the source materials to include blogs and other websites because I want to pick up on popular or personal meanings attached to scientific images. This becomes significantly different than my earlier theme of getting viewers to consider the message from an image, which the popular media provides through the context of the story. Instead, I’m expanding the messages to include more popular or personal ones to gain a better sense of the cultural significance from these scientific space images. I still want to include the actual science of the images to contrast with the fantastical things people come up with for them. Religion seems like the biggest mode of interpretation for meanings, although I may switch out the word to perhaps “spiritual” or just “cultural”. 

I also left the website title with “scientific” because I’m still hoping for appropriate non-NASA public domain images to expand the theme of the site. Perhaps some copyright-free nature images play a similar function, such as the many cultural readings from an image of the Grand Canyon rather than simple geology. Alternatively, “meanings” might not be the best word either…

Planning for the Future

Well, I tend to save electronic files and emails… but in reality probably never look at them again. Papers written during college now seem badly written and embarrassing… so I wouldn’t mind losing them. Prior websites or blogs usually get deleted after the end of courses.

For physical things I want to last however, someone usually pays significant money to preserve them. I took my diplomas for framing recently and learned about acid-free, UV-filtered techniques. The library will preserve my Master’s thesis as hardcopy printed on 100% cotton paper and bound.

The rest of the hardcopy from classes will end up in the recycle bin at some point. I might keep them for a few years and then wonder why before throwing them out. I have a small box of keepsakes that I’ve moved around from place to place, but haven’t actively sought to preserve them in any way.

Images seem to be remarkably resilient in file formats and electronic transfers. Have film? No problem. Have an old print? Scan it and use software to fix blemishes. Electronic file? Send to a machine in store for print pickup.

In summary, I neglect most things because I want to keep most things around just in case rather than forever. Even the few things that I’ve kept over the years have been neglected by lack of time or inclination to do more with them. Possibilities such as scrapbooking remain open if I ever get the spare time to experiment with it… :-p

Scarcity or Abundance?

It makes a lot of sense that historians need to play a larger role in the debate… if archives and history are two sides of the same coin, why are they considered so different from each other? While the specialization does allow for some efficiency on the part of the organizer or researcher, each remains dependent rather than independent of the other.

The Silent Spring reference seemed a bit alarming to me. The environmentalism came out of scary reports, such as pesticides showing up in breast milk being fed to babies… somehow I don’t think digitization is on the same scale, except to historians and the like…

The dependence on more technology than just the file format is a very good point. Hardware, software, and files are all needed to read digital materials. While commercial off the shelf solutions might be the easiest and cost-effective, it also allows these companies some control over the materials. Do we really want Adobe to have DRM type stuff on digitized historical material?!? :-p

These blogs also illustrate the scarcity vs abundance question. How valuable would these blogs of the current times and political events be for historians of the future? Unfortunately, I think that these blogs might be one of the easiest things lost, and quite a lot of analysis historians would not be able to make….

Digitizing…

Well, I stated off wondering what I would search for… decided on TS Elliot’s book on cats… failed to find it in the Internet Archive, which seems incredibly slow for searches… and randomly decided on Gilgamesh. A story set that long ago has to be out of copyright, right? :-p

I found two entries:

An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic: On the Basis of Recently Discovered Texts (1920)

Author: Morris Jastrow , Albert Tobias Clay
Publisher: Yale university press ; [etc., etc.]
Year: 1920
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English
Digitizing sponsor: Google
Book contributor: unknown library
Collection: americana
Description
Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

and:

An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic

Author: Anonymous
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English
Call number: gutenberg etext# 11000
Book contributor: Project Gutenberg
Collection: gutenberg
Description
Book from Project Gutenberg: An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic

Next, Google had many more options… both hits on Internet Archive also available through Google… is this cheating or would this be part of the point to make about digitized books? :-p

The main difference then becomes all about the interface for reading since the scans are exactly the same. I’m having slow downloads from the Internet Archive, which remains annoying, as well as some strange layout that looks scrunched from their use of an open book format. For this example, Google’s one page at a time works better for speed and layout.