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.
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