Before we had laptops, We had huge cinderblocks for computers. Before that we had entire rooms dedicated to holding bigger computers and all of their parts. In today’s age everyone has minicomputers in our hands everyday! Now instead of going to the library to find answers, we touch a few buttons on Google and there it is! In his article “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character, and Canadian History, 1997-2010” Ian Milligan states “Why the focus on keywords? While digital date-by-date searching has its advantages over traditional analogue microfilm searching – the ability to consult sources from home without travelling to a library”1 Meaning since everyone has access to a library in their hands what’s the point of travelling to one anymore?
Since technology is forever advancing the public is trying to make everything digital so we have access to it through the internet; however, Ian later continues that implementing older documents into our newer technology won’t really help us. He states “The most expensive OCR routines, finely honed on legal and corporate documents, choke on unique layouts…Even in a best-case scenario, OCR technology will necessarily produce a less-than-ideal situation in search integrity. The obvious way to improve accuracy is with direct human intervention.”2 This is like the Turning test. Although technology is so advanced and fine toned in today’s age, when a computer is put up against a human the computer won’t be able to perfectly replicate the human. Thus, since the computer won’t be able to comprehend or fully replicate these very old, important documents we will struggle trying to look at them and understand them.
For example, let’s say we are trying to copy the whole original paper of the Declaration of Independence onto our website. We want the whole layout of the paper, same handwriting, everything to be on our website. We want it to be interactable with facts on it, so on and so forth. We can take a photocopy of it, but then we would have to type everything from it to the website still. We tell the computer to scan it and implement it to the website for us, but the computer doesn’t understand the handwriting, the paper is old so some of it is faded, etc. making it so we would have to intervene. If we let the computer do it by itself a lot of pieces of that paper would be lost.
Martin, Kim & Quan-Haase, Anabel. (2013). Are e-books replacing print books? Tradition, serendipity, and opportunity in the adoption and use of e-books for historical research and teaching. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64. 10.1002/asi.22801.
Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94 no. 4, 2013, pp. 540-569. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/527016
- Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94 no. 4, 2013, pp. 540-569. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.
- Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94 no. 4, 2013, pp. 540-569. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.
