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”
