H9808A 2009 09 Digitization

Return to UWO History 9808A Digital History Fall 2009

The process of digitization extracts some of the information associated with a material entity: documents can be scanned or photographed, objects photographed or measured in three dimensions, and so on. This process greatly changes the information costs associated with doing history. Digital entities will last indefinitely, can be replicated as many times as necessary and can be transmitted at the speed of light. Visualization is concerned with the role that aesthetic considerations play in understanding and usability. The most flexible approach for content creators is to divorce form from content, and to let people or machines create alternative visualizations of underlying information.

• Choudhury et al, "Document Recognition for a Million Books," D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (March 2006).
  

• Cohen, "It’s About Russia," Dancohen.org (6 Mar 2007).
  

• Cohen and Rosenzweig, "Becoming Digital" Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
  

• Farid, "Photo Tampering throughout History."
  

• Gallagher, "Scottish Laser Pioneers Lead Way in Preserving World Heritage Treasures, The Observer (23 August 2009).
  

• Stanford University, "Library of Congress Subject Headings Galaxy"
  

• Turkel, "Traces of Use," Digital History Hacks (20 August 2008).
  

• Unsworth, "The Value of Digitization for Libraries and Humanities Scholarship," Newberry Library Symposium (17 May 2004).
  

• Whitelaw, The Visible Archive (2009).

Into the Time Machine! If you've had a chance to put down the books and get out for a while, you've no doubt noticed that this is the season when everyone goes gift shopping. And what better gift than a nice book? Following the lead of Mr. Dickens, in this assignment you are going to head for Christmas past. Go to Archive.org and load the Eaton's Fall and Winter catalogue from 1913-14. Starting on page "n282" you will find a list of books that Eaton's was selling that season. Your task is to choose 6-8 of the books advertised in the catalogue and find full online digital copies of them. (Some obvious places to search are Archive.org, Google Books, and the Gutenberg Project.) Write a blog post about your search, and provide a list of links to the books that you found. You can also write about some of the books that you couldn't find. As you're doing this assignment, pay attention to the unexpected. When you are writing your blog post try to reflect on what you found the most surprising about the process.