The presentation provided to us by Tony Guidone was both informative and interesting as he showed us the different ways that online databases can store information for users. Earlier in history it was absolutely necessary to hang on to physical copies of information but now we have the ability to upload and browse different versions of documents online.
The expansion of online databases have allowed for a new form of searching for information and this is through key word searching. Key word searching allows a user to search for information with a consistent theme or genre specific to their research.
The ease of key word searching has allowed me to access and process information at a much higher rate. Similar to what Milligan says in his section regarding The Quantitative Impact of Newspaper Databases, the more resources that a researcher has, the more confident they will be when conducting a project 1. This key word searching provides a researcher with the ability to see the sources for their topic on a broad spectrum but also it speeds up the process; projects that were conducted in traditional libraries will take longer than a project that uses different online databases.
These digital projects that we examined in our first week of class may not spark an immediate social change but there is potential. Digital projects have the ability to bring information to consumers in new and uncomfortable ways. To spark a social change there may need to be a sense of uneasiness to make the consumer desire to see change the way that the website designer does.
As easy as it is to use digital media nowadays, it does have its ups and downs. Digital media allows for online databases to store hundreds of thousands of units of information all on the same website. But having access to that much information can prove to be overwhelming to the consumer if they are not being specific enough to their research. A good resource tool for these online databases is topic modeling. Topic modeling allows a user to track their search topics over time to see how the quantitative data has shifted 2.
