Digital History

The Northern Virginia History Archive is an experimental project that was created by Professor Charlie Evans to collect digital media related to the history and the transformation of northern Virginia.  One of the biggest strengths of the site is that it is light and responsive.  Its retrospective style also gives visitors a nostalgic feeling when visiting the site.  The website encourages user contributions by allowing visitors to upload their contents onto the archive.  It also has a quality control feature that allows the site administrators to review the content that is being uploaded first before it gets published.  In sacrifice for simplicity and responsiveness, the tools available for contributors are limited.  Users won't be able to rotate or crop images through the website, all of that has to be done beforehand. Very much like Professor Evans, I am also attempting to build a historical website with a topic that is related to northern Virginia, perhaps focusing on the hi

One of the greatest challenges in the academic world is that most of the learning is just the essence of things.  This is also one of the reasons why book-smart people often struggle when confronted with reality.  No words, photos, videos or any existed mediums can truly capture reality with all its minute details.  There is a difference between studying the sky through reading, photos or videos and to experience the night sky for yourself.  Gaze at the grandness of infinity in all directions, hear the owls call and crickets sing, feel the breeze flowing through your hairs and the insects brushing pass your skin as they fly by, smell the breath of grasses and plants. There is not enough words or amount of pixels that can ever fully simulate reality. I am fortunate that I live in area rich of museums, and many of them offer free admission.  One of my greatest weaknesses is that I am not much of a scholarly type of person, and my many visits to the museums in Washington D.C. were purel

There is something about digitizing history that is almost an oxymoron.  Most of the historical records and findings are physical, hard evidence.  All great civilizations, no matter how great or long they lasted, eventually fell, leaving behind archaeological remains, such as dead languages that can never be deciphered with exact accuracy, but rather just a sum of best educated guesses.  If hard evidences present such great challenges for historians, how is our history in the digital world using cryptic arithmetic be recognized and deciphered eons in the future?  Unlike hard archaeological artifacts, digital information is non physical.  It seems like an impossible challenge to recover the memory of a fossilized brain.  What makes a flash memory chip found several millennia in the future be any different from a fossilized brain? For all practical purposes, I want to create a digital history project that is down-to-earth and relevant to the present.  My topic of choice will be on the

Since personal computers became accessible in the 1980s, almost every type of media that existed up to that point got digitized into formats that can be displayed or played on computers.  Technology has been leaping at an accelerated speed, and the demand for old digital files to get re-digitized to an even higher quality is ongoing and constant.  An old photographic film that gets scanned and digitized for CRT monitors will eventually need to be re-scanned for higher resolution digital monitors, and then again for HD, then Ultra HD, Retina, 4K, 8K, 16K, 3D, Super Mega Ultra 3D displays, and so on.  Just because something gets digitized doesn't necessary mean that its digitizing process will ever be concluded. As a graphic designer and a digital illustrator, part of my everyday work is digitizing physical media.  Illustrations, especially for marketing purposes will eventually need to be printed on grand format banners or displayed on large digital screens so it is crucial that t

If the English language were to be privatized, all English speakers will need to pay royalty to every English word that is used in everyday conversation or any other means.  In such case, I will need to pay a fortune to be able to publish this blog in English or come up with a whole new language.  In such condition, if I were to avoid committing a copyright crime, I would have to come up with a whole new language to be able to publish this blog without going broke; however, this new language that I come up with will be a new protected IP, and therefore for anyone who wants to read this blog and reply to it using this new IP would need to pay me royalty.  As a consequence, communication would be hindered and progress would be become retarded.  Sharing knowledge among each other will either be costly and cease to exist, or continue to exist among the so-called criminals. I support sensible copyright protection laws.  Creators and inventors who pour their sweat and tears into their work

The real beauty of almost anything is its usefulness.  The ocean is beautiful when you stare at it on your vacation away from work.  When in such condition, your brain relates the ocean to freeing from hardship and relaxation; however, the ocean becomes a nightmare if you are trapped in the middle of it, nothing but you and the infinite ocean with no sign of life in any direction, and at anytime you could be swallowed by it.  How beautiful can the ocean really be in this condition?  Like everything else in this world, beauty is subjective.  As a designer, to make something beautiful is to make something useful, practical and bring pleasant feelings to its users. Chart by TechCrunch, based on comScore's 2017 Mobile Usage Report It has been almost 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed and introduced the World Wide Web to the world in 1989.  Many changes have progressed since then.  The top internet connection speed today is over 30 thousand times faster than whe