Category: Text Searching/Guest Lecture

The digital realm is limitless when compared to old age text and 19th century (and before) dissertations. We now have the ability to read and/ or listen to something online and use citations and hyperlinks to dive deeper into fact checking, confirming doubt, or just learning more about that topic. These online databases, such as The Toronto Star: Pages of the Past and the Globe and Mail, talked about by Ian Milligan, that gives us over ten years of data to look at plus the digital references and pathways to find even more and earlier data regarding the subject. For me, a book is my favorite source of learning, but I would be lying if I said that all of my questions and thoughts get answered or touched on in a paper-back book; I now have the ability to read a book and then go online and research all of the underlying meanings and ideas that are sparked in my mind due to the text. Before the digital age, people would read a book, or a dissertation and that was it; you could think about it, read similar texts or other people’s ideas, but it was never something that you could truly dig to the bottom of. ¹

Academically, being able to ‘surf the web’ and research things online is a monumental change. Instead of going to the library, searching for a specific book or article, you can simply type into Google and find not only your answer, but a more in depth explanation on what you are looking for, but we are pretending that it is the same as physically reading a book or finding an answer ourselves. Personally, digital projects are great; giving those who may not know how to physically go out and find events a place to learn, and eventually join in and help in whatever way they can. These projects are also great because whether we like to admit it or not, we do not acknowledge big events that we may drive by with that much detailed thought; they kind of get brushed under the rug once they are not there anymore. These digital projects are anchored into the web, being forever attainable. So being able to use Google, Electronic Books, and Digital Projects, students and people in general have the resources to research anything and everything they want rather than having a ceiling that is the front and back of a book. ²

With all of that being said, I believe we lose some of our retainability when researching things online or typing a paper rather than reading a book or writing on paper. I definitely retain information better when I write it in a notebook rather than type it into a word document. I can type without looking or while having a conversation, as I’m sure many people can, but I am fully concentrated on what I am writing while writing and it engages my mind much more. It is obvious that we can research more things on the internet rather than in books or dissertations, but because of that, we tend to scratch the surface of thousands of topics rather than learning or mastering them. Reading a book and thinking about what you are reading gives our brains much more of a workout than a simple google search. I believe we are becoming lazy. I mean, why would I read a whole book or textbook for information that I can watch on YouTube? The efficiency and easy access of the internet is being replaced with regular, personal thought. We can learn whatever we want while sitting on a couch on our lap tops; that damages us because we are not then practicing the art of going out and finding things on our own.

I think since elementary school, teachers have been teaching us how to use Google and databases to narrow down sources for big essays, which is something that older generations did not have access to. It helps filter down information that may have taken hours to look for in a physical library before text searching existed. The secondary sources that are found during text searching help find primary resources that are necessary for some research projects or questions to support the argument. I think that in a less academic way as well, using search engines has become such a daily activity to answer quick questions or look for information in everyday life that it has made knowledge accessible to almost everyone with internet.

Digital projects can help make the way someone or an audience comprehends the topic it is trying to target. Referring back to last week’s project, “The Knotted Line” used an interactive timeline to engage the user in the history of prison reform and strides of freedom in the U.S., in addition to allowing the user to add their own personal experiences to comment section of the timeline. To me at least, as confusing as it was, it made me want to look for the next box on information and made me want to keep reading and I feel like that should be a goal for someone creating digital history project. It keeps the reader engaged and wanting to get informed on whatever topic it is referring to. In reference to social change, the more people find interest in the topic, the more it is talked about and something gets done about it.

In terms of something being gained, whatever topic of history is being talked gets a more modernized sense of being, therefore making it more relatable and understandable for the user to absorb the knowledge. It also reaches a larger audience than keeping it in a set location, which can also tie back to the first paragraph that talks about how it can help us engage with information.

References:

Guidone, Tony. 9 Sept. 2019.

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010 .” Project Muse, Dec. 2013, https://muse-jhu-edu.mutex.gmu.edu/article/527016.

Text searching has drastically changed how we interact with information. It makes finding exactly what you need and gaining access to those pieces of information much easier. Text searching has made doing research papers so much easier for me and I’ve been completely unaware until the guest presentation in class. It’s strange to think that I didn’t appreciate such a great tool until it was brought up in a lecture. This tool is a fairly simple way of finding the exact information you need regarding a certain topic, you just need to know how to search for it.

I say that because as someone who does a fair amount of research papers for school, I’ve found that text searching is only as useful as you make it. Searching the same key words over and over again is not going to get you anywhere. You need to adjust the words you use to get to certain answers and sometimes you have to be extremely specific to get exactly what you want. Besides that this is an amazing tool that brings you to so many digital resources that can help you in so many ways.

However, this information is only digital. By only being able to use this tool on digital media you miss out on human interaction with the primary source. You don’t get to feel the paper a letter was written on or look at the physical object. You can only interact with what can be digitally uploaded into the computer database.

Milligan’s article brought up a good point that I found relevant to the topic of text searching. Text searching is often used with databases such as the collections in the Library of Congress, as discussed in the article titled “WPA Publications in the Library Collections”. Milligan brought up a good point about these databases that said they give us a false sense of completion. They make us feel like all the information is there when there is an extremely high chance that some pieces of information are missing.

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.

“WPA Publications in the Library Collections  :  Amassing American ‘Stuff’: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s  :  Articles and Essays  :  Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939  :  Digital Collections  :  Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/amassing-american-stuff/wpa-publications-in-the-library-collections/.

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

I found Tony’s presentation very useful and definitely very helpful. I will be able to apply the techniques discussed in multiple of my other classes too. It was also really interesting to look at the coins and the newspapers he had bought for us. One of the tips that Tony explained that really resonated with me was text searching. This especially helped me when I started to look for sources for my research paper for my Criminology class. Being able to use keywords to search through the countless amount articles make it easier to find the right sources. Keywords also help make sure the article you are reading is exactly what you are looking for. Each result that pops up will include the date, page number, author and that specific highlighted section where that word was found. I think digital projects can create a big social change. I think they are a powerful way to bring words and information to everyone. These projects make it easy for the reader to engage with information in a more creative way than just reading it in a text book or watching the news. Digital Media has many benefits. One is improving social interaction, the media connects thousands of people everyday from all different walks of life. The media has given so many people a voice. Another benefit is enhancing education. By improving literacy rates among the youth, also by encouraging lifelong learning. A negative of the Digital Media is that lack of Historical information (Digital Dark Age). This is a result of technology constantly changing, and software or hardware going out of date. Even though a lot of historical information has been converted into digital media, some has unfortunately been lost throughout the process. Another negative is that a lot of the information that is on the internet is often false or incorrect. In Ian Milligans article, Illusionary Order, he stated that it was due to miss written citations, or no citations at all. He also said that the difference from  how historical newspapers were used then and now are also a negative. 

Sites

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.

Tony Guidone presenation

Tony Guidone’s presentation truly reminded me of past research project I had done. When working with a cultural piece and its influence keyword searching just doesn’t cut it. Back when I worked on the Mason’s Legacies project with professor Oberle I encountered many issues regarding the history of mixed race individuals, but through text search I came to find some of my most useful resources and worked to engage with them in a far more in-depth way. 

Text searching broadened my perspective on the culture in a way that keywords just couldn’t.  Text searching is about understanding. Keyword searching is about information.

Digital projects instill the same kind of informational diversity to the internet that Google did for the accessibility of the internet. Text searching fertilizes this understanding and deepens an appreciation of culture, and keyword searches build knowledge. Since Digital projects are built on this complicated cultural understanding and knowledge Digital project are capable of creating a mass influence of social change. Digital histories have become more prominent than ever with the distrust of the media and the distrust of official governments. Digital histories also have great influence because they can spread faster than any other form of history.

Even though Digital histories do have great influence on the future it does have its drawbacks. It can lose its sense of reality. It’s easy for people to ignore a topic if the topic their seeing isn’t presented to them in a fun way. The digital age is fueled by click bait and it’s difficult to give an academically in-depth digital project a click-bait title. Even if you did get people to click on your project; would it be taken seriously? Not all traffic is good traffic, and not all viewership on the internet is good viewership.

The need for sparkly pretty digital content outweighs the readers need for raw digital knowledge. Digital media is the limitation to Digital Projects. 

Even with that sad truth it is more important to get the information out there than to bottle it up in the world of academia.  There may not be many people who are particularly interested in Projects like The Enslaved children of George Mason, The History of the Mall, or Sensory Maps, but to have that information available is more important than any click-bait gimmick out there.

Works Cited

http://masonslegacies.org/

https://ecgm.omeka.net

http://mallhistory.org/

https://sensorymaps.com

Text searching has made interacting with the internet easier, I believe, for the general public. I think it also makes finding information faster. For purposes of research, keyword searching makes finding information less tedious and helps researchers find directly what they’re looking for. However, there are ¹ to keyword searching in digital databases, as we’ve talked about during Prof. Guidone’s presentation.

With the access and digitization of information, there are methodological problems that arise such as creating unnecessary hierarchies, not taking into account gender, and the fact that not everything is digitized. This creates an illusion of comprehensiveness. I think these methodological problems will fix themselves as society becomes more advanced in technology. If people find easier ways to make ² available online, more things can become digitized. Though, I think the main priority is creating a system that can sift through keywords in a more in-depth way.

³ and Prof. Guidone’s presentation both correlate when talking about ⁴. Prof. Guidone referenced many newspaper databases like Readex, archive.org, and hathitrust.org that displayed newspapers from earlier centuries. These databases help digital historians do their research, especially when using keyword searches.

I think digital projects can make significant social change due to the fact that our society is really transfixed on technology. I think if these digital projects are placed in the right place, like social media, it makes it more accessible for people to see and retrieve information. I think my generation is also really involved in social projects, so if it’s digitized, it makes social efforts easier to join and generally be made aware of.

Footnotes:

Pros – access is democratized, speed of research

Cons – original meanings conveyed by touch, surrounding context

Primary sources – anything produced or that existed in the time you’re studying

Ian Milligan’s article – Milligan, Ian.(2013). llusionary order: online databases, optical character recognition, and canadian history, 1997–2010. The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94, issue 4. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016

Digital history – “the application of digital methodologies and media to historical questions”

When I search for information on large databases I usually use keywords. The whole time I was in highschool, we were told to use keywords in order to find the most relevant information. However, it was pointed out by Professor Guidone that doing this can actually limit the amount of information you’re shown pertaining to your topic. But when you’re searching in a database the easiest thing to do is to find your keywords and type them into the search bar. I can certainly see why it limits your access- you’re only being shown documents with a very specific word in them. 

The awesome thing about digitization is that everything is permanently preserved on a computer, and it’s much more accessible. Information and artifacts have never been easier to look at, and you can do it from anywhere in the world. (As long as you have an internet connection.) Digital exhibits are extremely important in today’s academic society as well. The ease of access to technology has opened a whole new world in the sense that the possibilities of what we can do with them are endless. A really good example of a digital project that has the ability to educate thousands is the Enslaved Children of George Mason project. The information contained in it is a harsh reminder of how enslaved people were treated. They’re spoken of as less than, as possessions. It’s a little sickening when you remember that most of the Founding Fathers were slaveowners, and really only believed in independence for white men. It’s important to remember that yes, these records exist, and we have incredible access to them, but that’s what they were. Records of ownership, and records of possession. Our university is named after George Mason, but he viewed people as nothing more than possessions. ¹

The way information is presented is also very important. Sometimes newspapers or other records were formatted a specific way, and it doesn’t translate well online, so there are steps that have to be taken to assist with that. Professor Guidone showed us the Essex Register as an example of this. He did also point out to us that mostly everything prior to 1920 has been digitized, which is extremely helpful. Digital projects have opened up a whole new world of academia. So much more is available to us, and you don’t have to leave your house to look at a specific newspaper you need for research. You can just look it up in a database. 

References

Bracey, A., Farrow, K., Fatima, A., Perez-Garcia, E., & Murshed, F. (2017). The Enslaved Children of George Mason. Retrieved from https://ecgm.omeka.net/

Guidone, T. (2019). Digitization and Keyword Research [PowerPoint Slides].

Tony Guidone’s lecture was one that I, for the most part, agree with. The digitization of historical data and information is immensely important, as it provides previously difficult to access historical data to anyone with an internet connection. Data that would previously take hours or days can now be found in a matter of minutes, all due to the digitization of data. Personally, I find that concept to be very encouraging, because I have always believed that such information should be readily available and easy to access. 

Many times in the past, I have come across topics that have interested me in my free time, and I have been inspired to research them, only to find that the information I sought was in some records office several states away, or in another country. For example, I have always had an interest in researching my family tree. I want to see how far back I can trace my family lineage. My father did a similar project when he was my age. He spent months going through old family and court records, and he eventually crafted a family tree that was highly detailed for the 20th, 19th, and 18th centuries. Further back, the tree is sparse and uncertain, and it ends with one man who lived in England in the 1600s. 

Ever since I saw the sparse areas in the older parts of my family tree, I have wanted to fill it in and see how far I can go, and I have wanted to do so for both my dad’s family and my mother’s family. However, I keep facing the same wrinkle every time: the ancestors I wish to research all lived and died in Europe or in South America, and nearly all their records are in other languages. It is my hope that one day those records will be digitized and accessible online. As I am the stereotypical broke college student, traveling to Europe and South America is out of the question. So for me, the idea of such information becoming digitized and available to the public is exciting and filled with possibilities.

However, I understand the flipside of this issue as well. As information and data becomes digitized, the context is often lost. This can be a real problem when trying to understand history accurately. Ian Milligan is one of many who addressed this issue, and he noted that since many researchers are relying on information found online the “research process is built upon an often misunderstood foundation”(Milligan, 2013). Miriam Posner is another who addressed this issue. She noted how data, such as historical photos, was being stored in disorganized digital lists, completely without context or organization. 

I do believe that this is a problem, as historical information and data requires context in order to truly understood. However, I believe that ultimately the digitization of historical data is a very good thing, and I believe that over time, and through trial and error, we will find out how to best deal with this issue.

Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.Posner, Miriam. “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction.” Miriam Posners Blog, 25 June 2015, http://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/.

Tony Guidone’s presentation went more in depth with the topic of keyword searching, and he offered a more detailed idea of the drawbacks and the benefits that key word searching provide. Text searching has changed the way people interact with information both academically, and in other more recreational, simple ways. The entire concept of Google is based on keyword searching. But in terms of its academic impact, keyword searching has made it much easier for people to interact with old historical artifacts and use it in a way that’s “smarter not harder”. With keyword searching, there is no need to read an entire source to find what you’re looking for. This does significantly create social change because it alters the relationship regular people, not just scholars, have with digital projects and digital data in general. However, even though there is accessibility gained in keyword searching, there’s also things that are lost. For example, the original reading experience and the context that comes with reading and examining a whole work is lost because the reader is only looking for what they need, and thus is only being shown results that serve their research purposes.

In a blog post done by Miriam Posner in which she writes about a presentation she gave regarding Humanities Data ¹ , she explains the importance of data and it is evident that keyword searching plays a vital part in her research. However, she emphasizes the individual and their interpretation of the data that’s analyzed. What is obvious through both of these presentations is that research, digital data, and the humanities are deeply intertwines, and the relationship between the three things are only continuing to change with evolving technology and the way users choose to interact with it.