Sunday, May 3, 2015

Unit Fourteen: Big Picture, User Participation Projects and Crowd-Sourcing

Preserving Digital History – When I started the readings for this week, I kept thinking about my family and the photos we take.  I come from a family of big photographers.  Not to suggest we are a particularly talented group, but we do love to take photos.
My father takes photos and has prints made and puts them into albums. I take photos, post a few on Facebook and on Shutterfly and create bound photo books.  My younger cousin takes photos almost exclusively on instagram.  What struck me is that as things are now, as our ages go up, the number of people who view our photos goes down.  Will that always be the case?  Generations from now, will they still have the capability to look at Instagram accounts and Facebook or will the albums or boxes discovered in an attic of my great, great, grandchildren be what people in the future look to when researching the past?  If we are not mindful of how we are saving our digital artifacts we run the risk of them never being seen again.

User Participation and Crowd-Sourcing – Beyond Wikipedia, I was not aware of any “user participation” history sites like the ones we discussed in this class.  I love the idea of being part of bringing history and historic artifacts to thousands of people around the world.  I imaging this could be come a favorite pastime activity!  When searching for a Crowd-Sourcing project website I came across Helping History It’s a work in progress, but has links to tons of sites that you can offer your services to on a variety of topics.

I think there are two huge concerns that need to be addressed: 1) with the ease of saving digital artifacts, do we run the risk of preserving "too much"? and 2) with using crowd-sourced information, do you run the rise of preserving incorrect information.  Without a few more standards and protocols in place, we are in danger of saving so much information or saving the wrong information, that we are unable to use what has been preserved effectively.  

Final Project: Here is a link to my final project.  It is not where I hoped it would be at this point, but I’ve blocked off some serious time to complete it.  I’ve added my DV word cloud project, but have not yet added my timeline.  I feel the section on the Declaration of Independence is pretty solid but I would appreciate any feedback.  



1 comment:

  1. I am not sure that we can preserve too much. For example, working with my own larger family, it is surprising how little there is left to actually preserve anymore!

    Your kids are going to love the fact that you have your own site, and they are going to like the fact that you are going to challenge them to create their own digital projects too.
    Professor Evans

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