Digital History Blog

Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, Last Updated: November 29, 2009

Founded by: Michael S Hart in 1971

Reviewed by: Tracy Goldberg on 3/31/10

Project Gutenberg (PG) is the largest and first collection of free electronic books. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart (who invented the eBook) and its mission is to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.” The website that contains this mass digital book collection would fall under the archive category (a site that provides a body of primary documents) in website genre. Its collection holds mostly full texts that have fallen into the public domain. There are over 30,000 free eBooks that can be downloaded to a multitude of platforms, such as a PC, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader or other portable devices.

For the first part of the review, I will ignore the ascetics of the website and concentrate on the content alone. The main purpose of this archive is to preserve and make available digital books to the public and that is what they have accomplished.

The site starts with an introduction to the website and an explanation of what they provide. In the left hand corner, there is a search box where you can input the author or title words to find an eBook. They also have advanced search, browse catalog or bookshelf option. There is also a search box to look for a term within the catalog and the website itself. For an archive website, the search option is extremely vital for the functionality of the site. If a site bar was buried in links and pictures it would be difficult to use the archive to its full potential. PG also has ‘browse by topic’, ‘top downloads’ and ‘recently added’ to help make the search for the right eBook easier.

One of the downside of the search tool is that there is no fix to misspelled words. I did a search for “Sherlock Holmes” in the title words search and found 13 books with the word ‘Sherlock’ and 47 books with ‘Holmes” but when I searched the word “Sherlock Homes”, no books came back. It would have been a nice feature to correct spelling, as Google does with a, “Did you mean…?”  I then tried to search Sherlock Holmes with quotations around the word and did not find any titles (despite one of the books in their collection being The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes). So for an archive website, despite the variety of options to search, and the ease of finding the search, the actual results could be finer tuned and other features could be included.

The actual display of books is very basic but easy to read. You can jump to a certain page and even bookmark it. And as stated earlier, you can download the file to whatever platform you choose, so you can read an eBook on the go. The portability and array of options make this a very good eBook archive and make it useful for people who might want to integrate it into teaching more make it available to students so they would not have to pay to buy the books. The only downside to the actual text online that is all very plain; you have the words on a screen and there is no resemblance to what it actually might have looked like when printed (unlike on Google Books that provides a scanned copy of the book online).

Expert from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Left Project Gutenberg, Right Google Books

PG is a non-profit organization and its main purpose is to provide the public with an archive of digital books to download. There doesn’t seem to be any influence or biases involved with the process. The project is also done by volunteer work, so the project for the public is done by the public. There is also an extensive process to make sure all work is correct and links on every page to insure that the text is proof-read and not edited. However, some people have had issue with lack of scholarly information on the texts, such as the edition of the work, but PG offers link to report issues to correct those emissions.  

The biggest downfall of the website is the visual website and presentation. Perhaps the de-emphasis of presentation is a strategy to highlight the pure archive aspect. It very simple and plain and looks to be the original site display that it might have been when it was first created. It does not have an original or innovative design and seems to have the overall layout of a Wikipedia entry. The creators of the website could have utilized the medium of the web to make a more visually attractive website that could entice the user to explore. Even the Google Books website uses pictures (book covers) to highlight books in certain sections. All of these aspects lead to a users experience and what PG has now does not encourage any type of experience outside of the actual contents of the archive.

All in all, I believe this is an effective web archive. It was established to provide the public with a large selection of eBooks, all in one place and as of now the number of eBooks is over 300,000 and growing. Even though the site itself is not pretty, and the presentation of books lacks pictures (even books covers) it accomplishes the goals it set out to do. Because it is a non for profit organization and works on donations and volunteer work it is acceptable that it ignored site design but I believe in order to engage a reader, especially younger readers, a more modern and unique site design could be very effective.

The argument with the photoshopping of photographs often revolves around the fashion and entertainment world with the photoshopping of models putting forth unrealistic images to the public and making young women strive toward impossible figures.

In France and the UK, governments are debating whether legislation should be made in order to ban this photographs or at the very least putting warnings that would let the reader know that the image they are looking at, like a smooth faced, young looking Madonna, or a supermodel smaller than a size zero, is in fact photoshopped and “enhanced”.

They believe that these images are powerful enough to effect the psyche of young children and could influence them to develop eating disorders or bad self images.

Example:

So why would this come up in the conversation about History? Photoshop is a problem in other fields besides for fashion. Recently in the Beijing Olympics, stories came out about the photoshopping of fireworks in the opening ceremony. Why would they do that or what “harm” could come about that? I think that China’s photoshopping could be seen as a way to put forth this image of a nation of the future. They were able to have these fancy fireworks (footprints in the sky leading to the stadium) and that they should be recognized as a technological force.

Pictures can elicit emotion and also serve as a permanent memory of an event. Photoshopping can doctor these memories and change the emotion of what they photo was trying to document.

Personally, I dislike photoshop. All the pictures I take I do not touch up. I believe that when people change the color temperatures or add effects it changes the overall image and what it was trying to convey. Photoshop can be a dangerous tool and can be used to make an image more threatening (Iran missile launch) or just changing an image to obscure the what is actually going on. I agree with France that there should be some kind of label placed on those pictures and also perhaps putting more emphasis on digital studies and having photoshop experts on panels to examine pictures.

Home Page

The Legal Obstacles of Google Books

Short introduction to the project, what it hopes to accomplish, the target audience etc

I hope that my assignment will be used as a High School level introductory course into international and copyright law with a practical example.  I hope that teachers will be able to use the information gathered to guide students to this example to apply the theory that they learned. Teachers will most likely include this website in their syllabus or direct students to read about it so they will get a better understanding of the topic they just learned. I also envision my project would be used to help supplement a kind of moot court in class. A teacher can give the assignment of a similar situation, give this website as background information and have them apply it their case.

Table of Contents (Hyperlinks)

-History of Google and Google Books

-History of the digital book movement and efforts and other players in the game and what they have tried to do, and how Google Books might differ

-Short Explanation of the current international copyright laws and perhaps other important precedent setting cases

-Current legal issues of Google Books

-International Copyright (Just the facts)

-Google Side

-Plaintiff

-Monopoly (Just the facts)

-Google Side

-Plaintiff

-Impact on Academia (why is it important, who does it impact)

-Links to other sites of information and interest

-Conclusion

-Resources/Works Cited

Bolded text will be separate pages while the italicized texts will be pages that branch off from the website (but still be separate pages)

Just read an article on copyright laws getting in the way of digital preservation. As someone like me who is interested in copyright law and who might want to study it in the next coming years in law school, I found it be interesting and dialogue starting.

His main point was that the current copyright laws are hindering those who wish to preserve all of our digital data and universal data. If someone wanted to update and change the format a video was in, to prevent it from falling into the obsolete technology grasps, there is too much legal red tape and the academic delays and prevents it from being preserved.

“The issue of copyright is a global nightmare for anyone interested in digital preservation. The problems that Google has encountered in its – utterly praiseworthy – quest to digitise the world’s books are nothing compared to the problems of preserving documentary films where the multiple permissions needed for each one from commercial interests will, as Lawrence Lessig brilliantly describes in the New Republic, lead to a situation where ” the vast majority of documentary films from the 20th century will be forever buried in a lawyer’s thicket inaccessible (legally) because of a set of permissions built into these films at their creation”.”

So with websites going in and out of fashion, and social media sites gaining in popularity, issues over who is going to catalogue this data and how can it be saved for the future emerges.

In my opinion, with personal data and information, people need to be in charge of their own preservation. I still have documents and pictures I have written and taken since middle school, because I consciously transfer them from medium to medium, and computer to computer. Websites that I have used, like geocities and GreatestJournal, that have gone under, I have saved all my data into word documents.

But with other more public forms, like movies and books, the issue gets a little more complicated. While I agree that perhaps some of the current copyright laws need to be reexamined (maybe to shorten the current life +70 years terms) but as of now, that is what the law is.

Keegan has a good plan;

“It is sometimes argued that if copyright law is standing in the way of a universal archive then maybe the world’s collective memories should be placed into some kind of escrow account, not to be opened until copyrights have been sorted out or expired. This sounds plausible, but it would act against the worthy principles espoused by the British Library and others that as much as is humanly possible should not just be available but available now.”

I believe that these issues will be resolved in the long run. While digital technology is still relatively new and extremely different than past advances, changes have been made in society before and we have all adapted. Like the people who complained that typewriters will ruin print handwriting and the way people write, and the people who make the same claims about computers, technology advances and for a society to advance, we adapt to these changes. It has been done before and it will happen many times over in the future.

Integration and the natural progression of time are essential for any new idea that runs against the norms to be accepted. One would think that the existence of the Digital History Field would not be so counter to the hegemonic norms of the history field already in existence. Internet and other forms of digital technology are very much part of today’s culture. Even traditional news outlets, such as newspapers are feeling the squeeze of digital technology and are facing questions of their viable future without adapting to the digital age.

But for some reason, Digital History is still not fully accepted in academia. A lot of people see it as not substation as the traditional history field and some professors who produce digital history are not considered for tenure because they do not publish it in book form.

I believe that digital history is the future and that while it might take time to accept, little things are helping move along the process.

Like digital textbooks.

The NY Times published an article on February 21^st talking about the how Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of textbooks, have announced that they will begin to sell their software, DynamicBooks, which allows college professors to edit digital editions of textbook and customize them for their classes.

They will start by selling 100 titles, including: “Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight,” by Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones; “Discovering the Universe,” by Neil F. Comins and William J. Kaufmann; and “Psychology,” by Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert and Daniel M. Wegner. Mr. Napack.

Articles like this have been popping up all over the blogosphere and mainstream media outlets. More schools are looking to digital technology to bring their classrooms into the future as well as way to engage the digital savvy students.

Even though there is a big difference between digital history and a digital textbook, I believe that this is a step bridging the gap between those who are hesitant to accept digital history. The more technology is used in the classroom and seen as a tool of academia, and the more exposure it has in the education field, people will begin to see the merit in digital history and realize that it too has great value in preserving and studying our past.

There are many advantages and positive reasons as to why history should make the push to embrace and use the digital medium. When doing research for a paper for school I often wish I could find everything I needed on the internet and without leaving my home then having to go to a library and searching through stacks of books. And while there have been a lot of advances in the move to making things more digital, such as Google Books, there is still a lot to be questioned over digital history.

I for one think that digital history as a place in the history field and that opposition to it comes mainly from fear of the new and unknown. But some of the reading assigned to class this past week makes some points that I agree with and have thought of as well as hurdles to digital history.

In Digital History by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, they talk about some of the issues with making the change from traditional to digital history.

“It can involve more technical hurdles than a simple history website; legal and ethical concerns, such as invasion of privacy and the ownership of contributed material…” (162)

Will historians now in graduate school be required to take html and computer courses just so they can have the ability to display there work. If they were to just publish a book, they would not have to know how to work the book publishing machines but in the digital history field, many of those historians are expected to know the basics of coding and the technology.

Another reason they site is the anonymity of the Internet, and that you don’t know sometimes whom you are dealing with. Perhaps a bored teenager decided to pose as a historian and create some fabricated research site about the founding fathers (although Cohen and Rosenzweig dismiss this because teenagers simply don’t care enough to do this, clearly they haven’t been on Wikipedia or 4chan.org very often).

Another issue I think should be addressed is that with books, that medium is more permanent. While books can go out of print and are hard to find, for the most part they are still around. But with websites, people can stop paying the website fees or maybe some new type of Internet technology and computers will come around and people simply won’t want to or can’t move all the information over.

I’m sure most of the issues will be worked out over time but for now these hurdles might prevent those traditional historians from being on board with new technology and can hinder the process of the evolution into the digital age.

In the biweekly discussion of how digital media is effecting teaching and learning, episode 29 talks about the use of the Amazon Kindle in being used for textbooks, instead of the traditional paper back version. They claim that the digital form of the work on the Kindle could be better because out of print or rarely used paperback versions that would otherwise clutter warehouses find a home. Also it is a cheaper alternative for college students who could at times spend over $100 on a single text book. New digital platforms can also be used, such as the kindle, to display digital only and online versions of books or even historical projects. It is because of this use that the new apple iPad I think can change ways of learning and taking in information.

Gizmodo.com had an interesting article about using the iPad in museums in libraries. The article talks about museums and libraries using the iPad to displays e-books and introducing a tactile way of accessing information.

…Due to the size and weight of the iPad, we could be seeing a lot of innovative uses for them, as interactive wallpaper in clubs, teaching aides in schools, and so on.

The iPad not only displays information in a new and fun way, but it also engages the audience to maniulate and control the information displayed. A big part of disgital history and the digital medium, as said in the podcast mentioned above, is that the reader now becomes an active particpant and they have some control on how the information is told to them.

Because the iPad’s size and weight, and e-book technology we could be seeing it being utilized in libraries around the country and in museums to have more interactive exhibits. It could also be a tool used in classrooms to engage and otherwise uninspired and unenthused students. I believe the iPad, like the kindle, will change how we use digital media in digital history and will help integrate it to a mostly paper and technology fearing field.

Practicing for class…

Feel better about this because I think I’ve done some html and things similar to wordpress in the past.

Also am just playing around with all these fancy buttons.