Shotgun!

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 history of Northern Virginia Community College.  The format of delivery will be in the form of a website.  I will make use of one of the open source content management systems, such as Joomla or WordPress.  Although we often overlook the things that are right in front of us while fantasizing of things that are beyond our sight, I believe that the history of NVCC could be very interesting.

Comments

  1. Professor Charles EvansJune 22, 2017 at 6:50 AM

    I'd like you to use Joomla so that I can get a better idea of how that works.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Northern Virginia Digital History Archive

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, p...
Read more

The Digital Classroom of the Future

When Lewis Perleman predicted an imminent future where learning can be done at hyper speed due to the revolution of technology, was he a psychic or was he simply just facing reality?  Sometimes, the future is easier to predict if we all could let go of our own biases and denial of unfavorable changes. In the 70s, Xerox refused to recognize the value behind the experimental Graphical User Interface, designed by their own engineers, because they wanted to believe that graphics should be printed on paper. They wanted to focus on printing products over the abstract idea of graphical UI.  This lead to their most innovative engineers migrating to Apple together with their most valuable ideas which helped make Apple a leading technology giant that put Xerox to shame. In 1975, Kodak was the first company to introduce the digital camera, but because the idea of a filmless camera would hurt their film business, they brushed the idea of digital cameras aside.  In the following y...
Read more

Crowd Sourcing is Crowd Services

Topics in history can be infinite, every grain of sand can have a history of its own, and its values are only appreciated by those who are directly connected to it.  History is appreciated when it's passed and gone.  The scarcity of the accessibility through time is what gives history its value.  If historical records become abundant, their values will be equivalent to another grain of sand among the desert. Preserving history in digital format is not necessarily about preserving history, but it has more to do with providing accessibility to historical records.  This accessibility will always need to continuously adjust to whatever medium and language that is appropriate at that specific time.  If people can read Old-English and paper is cheap and affordable, then this accessibility will come in the form of writing using Old-English printed on paper.  History itself, by nature, is never-ending changes, so it should not be a surprise that the medium that ...
Read more