In this week’s readings, we
were introduced to the world of digitization – a world still without a compass
for navigation the digital realm, but one which archivists and other cultural
institutions are bravely taking on.
The historian Roy Rosenzweig,
founder of the Center for New Media at George Mason University, wrote an
article that described the pitfalls of the digital era. How will historians
craft their histories when there is even more information and documents to
choose from? This “culture of abundance” makes it more challenging to construct
histories, especially when future historians will work with digital documents
that are even less stable than their paper counterparts. Rosenzweig published
this article in 2003, and today’s world is vastly different just twelve years
later. We now have Google Drive and various cloud services, the iPhone, among
other innovations. But many of these questions and problems still remain.
It’s especially difficult when
you’re working even just to digitize paper documents, let alone worrying about
born-digital files. Digitization efforts cost institutions quite a bit of
money, and institutions are already strapped for cash. I found it interesting
that Rosenzweig made a call for historians to also concern themselves with the
preservation of digital material. I’m not sure under which model this would
happen, seeing as graduate programs are already under such financial and
staffing constraints.
Even so, Rosenzweig makes a
major point. Historians are substantial archival users, and they should also
concern themselves with these materials as the profession moves further into
the digital era. Archivists, however, will play a major role in assessing the
value of this information in order to weed out information that will undoubtedly
take up too much space. I’d be interested to see if any collaborations
transpire between historians and archivists as the trajectory of the history
profession moves towards the digital course.
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