Text searching has changed the way I engage with information online because it has made me very cautious of the results I receive. For example, the formatting of a search, the choice of words or even the order in which the information is entered can impact what kind of results are given. In addition to academia, text searching impacts things as simple as a google search to find food nearby. But more importantly, text searching has also made me aware that not everything is as it seems and it’s necessary to be critical of the results that are given. Just working on this blog post has made me curious about the relationship between the collection of personal data, text searching, and the given results that are catered to each individual search and person.
The democratization of access is something that is gained by using digital media, but there are also a few things that are lost. One aspect of Tony Guidone’s argument was that by using digital media the meanings conveyed by touch and the original reading experience can often be lost. This is essentially what Ian Milligan is arguing when they said that optical character recognition (OCR) struggles with medium transformations, printing noise, and non-standard fonts. More specifically, medium transformations make it hard for the sustainability of an original documents information and meaning.
1Regardless, I do think that digital projects can create significant social change because the democratization of the access of information is definitely progression, but I would be cautious to link the increase in digital projects to the democratization of data. I think the privatization to the access of knowledge is something that historians need to avoid as digital history expands and becomes more popular. For example, databases that are offered to university students that are normally not open access is limiting the audience to boundaries of employment and age. On the other hand, the Enslaved Children of George Mason on the Mason’s legacies repository is a good example of the impact a digital history project can make in democratizing access. The information on George Mason and Gunston Hall is now readily accessible and allows for more people to become aware of the situation at hand.
