Roy Rozenweig’s essay details the discussion of our ability to preserve the past through digitization. Specifically, with the internet, Rozenweig explains that SO much information about certain historical events such as 9/11 are easily searchable and made memorable by search engines such as google. However, Rozenweig warns that this digitization is not a permanent remembrance of the past:

Not only are ephemera like “Bert” and government records made vulnerable by digitization, but so are traditional works–books, journals, and film–that are increasingly being born digitally. As yet, no one has figured out how to ensure that the digital present will be available to the future’s historians.

Through his work, Rozenwieg presents an interesting idea: current historians and history teachers must think “simultaneously about how to research, write, and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future of record scarcity.”

Though we are currently in a “golden age” of documentation and historical archiving, this golden age could unexpectedly fall. The article presents the thoughts of one writer for the Washington Post who noted that this society of preservation could fall just like societies of prehistoric times, considering the idea that, “The members of prehistoric societies did not think they lived in prehistoric times.” Rather, “They merely lacked a good preservation medium.”

WIth Rozenwieg’s ideas afloat, it was interesting to move on to the exploration readings of The April 16 archive, The Hurricane Digital Memory Book, and The September 11 Digital Archive. Each website offered various personal accounts and remembrances of these tragic events. Each reading or entry was more vivid and pathos-filled than the last. The Hurricane Digital Memory Book told stories of survivors from the Hurricane as well as recollections of lost loved ones. The September 11 Digital Archive offered similar stories, and the April 16 archive had collected memories of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

One of my favorite posts was this quick little mention in the April 16 Archive. It was called “Bear Hugs” and merely stated that “free bear hugs were set up in the student lounge shortly after the incident. I thought this simple gesture was one of the kindest and simplest actions anyone could have taken:

After viewing all of these heart-breaking, saddening archives, I’m going to need to listen to some upbeat music. However, I’m also left with what I think Rozenwieg wanted me to come away with after reading his work: We live in a time where literally anything and everything can be digitized and preserved. However, this ability has immeasurable implications for our society and raises important questions like, “Is this digitization permanent? Is it accurate? How much will we have preserved 100 years from now?” These are crazy questions, but I’m not sure if we will ever find the answer to “what will happen when” until we are actually thrown into the future.

The first exploration exercise of this week was to view the Time Magazine Corpus. I must say, though this service provides copious information and historical research, I cannot stand it. I think the site is ugly, bland, and makes me think I’m on a website with an Excell sheet that will never fully load. Furthermore, I think, thought the information is there, it is confusing. Things are not clearly explained or presented. I DO NOT like this Time Magazine Corpus at all.

However, while I detested the Time Magazine Corpus, the other area of exploration: Google Ngram was extremely entertaining and easy to understand. Essentially, Google Ngram allows you to enter in a word or phrase and search it through their corpus of google books. It will tell you how frequently the specific word or phrase appeared in Google Books across the years.

For one search, I chose to enter in the word “gay.” As a gender studies minor with an interest in the LGBT movement, rhetoric relating to the LGBT community has always fascinated me. I figured entering the word “gay” into the Ngram Viewer might spark some interesting results.

Here is a screen shot of the findings:

The word was used in .00064% of books in the early 1800s. Though there was some fluctuation over the next two hundred years, the frequency lowered significantly until its ultimate peak of .00077% in 2000. I think that this simple graph can say a LOT about the word “gay.” Though I have yet to research this further, it is my assumption that gay was used more frequently in the early 1800’s because it had a different meaning during that time. “Gay” meant “happy, or joyous.” However as the term began to associate itself with homosexuality, it was used less frequently, given the taboo nature of the sexual orientation. Then, as the new millennium approached and the Gay Rights Movement began to increase and expand, so did the word’s usage in literature.

Perhaps one day I will research this further, but until then I will continue to hate Time Magazine Corpus and love Google Ngram Viewer.

This week, we were responsible for reading Professor Cohen’s From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections. The reading described Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel in which the narrator describes bizarre rooms filled with books piled on top of books and all the pages of all the books contain incoherent letters and scrambled messages that make no sense. Used as an attention getter, this story ultimately links to various ways in which people are able to sift and sort through digital information. The reading brings up a “syllabus finder” used to find, locate, and organize various syllabi that professors may put online. This notion highlights the idea of information sorting through things like keyword searches and date entries that we have addressed numerous times in class.

The reading went on to discuss the more complex information searching application of “question and answer.” This idea of typing a question into a specific information search and instantly receiving an answer is quite complex. The reading states:

QA is a far greater challenge than document classification because it exercises almost all of the computational muscles. Not only do you have to find relevant documents in massive corpuses (involving methodologies of search and document classification), you also have to interpret users’ questions well to know what they are looking for (natural language processing) and analyze the text of retrieved documents using a variety of statistical and linguistic methods (information theory, regular expressions, and other text parsing techniques).

Immediately, this QA made me thing of one of the most frequently used online question and answer services: Yahoo answers

Though the purpose is to answer your questions quickly and accurately, there is overwhelming room for error. This specific QA offers answers to be posted by ANYONE with a computer. However, this does allow for strange and humorous posts such as this one:

The internet is a vast, bottomless pit of information. But luckily, things like syllabus finders and QA’s are helpings us, in some ways, to sift through all that data.

Based of the former PowerPoint reading, my distaste for PowerPoint has only increased. WIth the assignment for creating a short slideshow about a moment in history, I chose to create a basic, simple slideshow. The slides are not the most exciting nor are they the most informative. This is because if I were to use them in an actual presentation about The Stonewall Riots, I would want listeners to focus on what I am saying, using the slideshow only as a reinforcement of my words. These are my slides:

With the “create a chart using historical data” prompt, data revolving around a recent history immediately came to my mind. With the election of last week, I chose to depict some presidential information in my chart. Specifically, many people have been commenting on how the votes of various races played a large role in the re-election of President Obama. With this in mind, I created a chart showing the breakdown of Obama voters based on race:

Unfortunately, the caucasian percentage were cut off. However, the breakdown for Caucasian voters was 66.2%

As I was reading Edward Tufte’s work Powerpoint is Evil I found myself constantly in agreement. Powerpoint is nice… But it rarely enhances a presentation or comprehension of a lecture. Tufte made a great point when he said:

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials.

I think there is a great need to address the problems associated with powerpoint. It is not used as a visual aid in presentations, but rather, a substitute for what a presenter is saying. Personally, if my teacher puts a powerpoint up on the screen, I immediately began to regurgitate the text from the screen on to my laptop. This causes me to completely ignore what my teacher is saying. But, I feel like if they’re showing me a powerpoint of information, I should be responsible for knowing it!

After a quick google search, I found this blog to be pretty interesting and informative. This blog indicates that bad power point is potentially wasting $250 million a day! While the writer of this blog, Alexia Kapterev, is an opponent of Powerpoint, he makes a valid argument when he says that the technology itself is not the problem, but instead, the way in which people use it.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation was quite humorous. I love the short intro on the home page of Abraham Lincoln having some technical difficulties and telling us that “we couldn’t live without technology.” The slideshow was so unnecessary that I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Overall, while I’ve never been a fan of PowerPoint, this week’s readings furthered my distaste for the technology. I think that maybe someday, people will understand a way to properly and effectively use PowerPoint. But, until then, we’ll just all have to subject ourselves to a few more boring presentations.