Monthly Archives: February 2010

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.