History 513 2007-08 13. Digitization: Atoms into Bits

9 Jan 2008

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.

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Easy. Moving images. There are large collections of television, video and film clips at the CBC Archives, the BBC Motion Gallery, the Prelinger Archives and the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. Search these sites for sources of interest in your own research. What kind of special problems are posed by working with (digital) moving images?

Easy. Tags over time. The Research team at Yahoo! created a visualization of change in Flickr tags over time called Taglines. Experiment with the interface for a while, making sure to explore both the ‘river’ and ‘waterfall’ metaphors. What do you learn by being immersed in the flow of tags? Do the two different interface metaphors encapsulate different forms of historical consciousness? Why or why not? You can find out more about the project in Micah Dubinko, et al, “Visualizing Tags over Time,” WWW 2006.