Digital Mapping: imagineRio

http://www.sscommons.org/openlibrary/ExternalIV.jsp?objectId=4jEkdDAtKj41RkY6fjZ6Tn9DOHckd1d1eQ%3D%3D&fs=true
City plan of Rio de janeiro by  José Correia Rangel de Bulhões, 1796.

As digital technology advanced towards establishing high resolution images of the cities a new generation of digital maps encouraged the creation of a multidisciplinary academic field known as spatial humanities. In this field historians, geographers, web designers, programmers gathered into one research using a Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location to re-examine real and fictional places (Cohen, 2011). Today’s thoughts are coming towards an analysis of an online history project that makes use of digital mapping. The project analyzed here is imagineRio: Illustrated Diachronic Atlas of Rio de Janeiro’s Urban and Social Evolution.

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The Digital Turn

This week’s post is focused on the contribution of digital scholarship for historians and the society. In order to understand how research was affected by the development of technological tools, one needs to observe and talk with researchers and learners (most of the time they are the same). Throughout these last decades, many have used digital scholarship in several different ways. The American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences affirms that digital scholarship may mean

building a digital collection of information for further study and analysis, creating appropriate tools for collection-building, using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new intellectual products, or even creating authoring tools for these new intellectual products, either in traditional forms or in digital form.

In this sense, if you observe the historical scholarly production lately, you can find the creation of apps, interactive timelines and maps, collaborative multidisciplinary projects of digitizing newspapers, collecting and archiving photographs and exploring historical questions at the same time. The possibilities are endless and all it takes is creativity, research and some tech skills.

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Digital Historians and License Formats

Copyright_copyleft

Digital humanities opened an endless avenue offering possibilities for online research and teaching. As long as you have the democratization of the accessibility to technology, Digital humanities can disseminate knowledge and scholarship from academia towards the rest of the world. The work of public and digital historians needs to approach this expansion in order to achieve some future/present success.

There are pros and cons in all kinds of licenses, you have to adjust your goals to each one of them. Beware that, for example, at the same time the free usage of content develops an avenue to the great international in-depth debates and it helps you think about your research, it also fuels the misuse of produced content in a way that content producers are constantly not cited. However, as a researcher who intends to publicize academic findings as much as possible, I believe that having tools of publicly sharing information contributes enormously to qualitative changes in the way historical research is done around the world.

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Digital Preservation: What is published? What is silenced?

social network

As we move towards more epistemological discussions on the existence and organization of the Internet, measuring the volume of information received by this open repository appears as a necessary action. The idea of digital preservation emerges with challenges developed on our daily lives as users of this web. Because of the uncertainty on how the Internet works, and the companies and governments rule the web space, questions such as “What would it be like to write history when faced by an essentially complete historical record?”(Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance?) is relevant to guide us on the way we act online as historians. The phenomena of “astonishingly rapid accumulation of digital data” (Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance?) seriously affects in several different ways lives of not only scholars, but users in general.

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Born Digital

RICHES UCF History program

This week’s exercise relied on an examination of several digital archives with content considered born digital and focused on the remembrance of tragedies. Although the concept of born digital appears to be vague, I’ll consider here as the kind of content emerges from digital technology such as computers, digital cameras and audio recorders. Here are some thoughts based on the writings of Dan Cohen, Roy Rosenzweig and other digital humanists.

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Digital Libraries, Archives and Open Culture

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0ngLBa4ewM[/youtube]

Digital humanities opened an endless avenue offering possibilities for online research and teaching. As long as you have the democratization of the internet and the accessibility to technology, Digital humanities can expand knowledge and scholarship beyond academia. The great achievement of the field/medium needs to be that. The democratization of knowledge and technology. People having access to research and information. However, as digital technology comes with expensive prices in its components, digitization and storeging also costs lot of money. According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, changing a analog document into a digital one naturally comes with a loss of quality or meaning (Digital History, 82). The authors quote one leading library scholar, Abby Smith to explain in details how that loss usually works. According to Smith “analog information can range from the subtle tones and gradations of the chiaroscuro in a Berenice Abbott photograph of Manhattan in the early morning light, to the changes in the volume, tone, and pitch recorded on a tape that might, when played back on equipment, turn out to be the basement tapes of Bob Dylan” (Digital History, 82).

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Building Digital Timelines

timeline

This week’s exercise relied on building a digital timeline. The project that I’m talking here is the one that I made after finishing my Masters Thesis: The Story of Parramore, Orlando. When I decided to build this timeline, I thought about as a didactic complement to the textual part of my thesis. Understanding the necessity of giving a feedback to the community that I researched, I realized that having kind of visualization would help me to spread my studies in different perspective beyond blocks of texts. Therefore, my concern was adjusting the main section of my extensive work into a shorter narrative that could be elaborated with photographs, videos, drawings or any other kind of visual possibility.

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App Review: “Explorer” of the American Museum of Natural History

                                 American_Museum_of_Natural_History

The American Museum of Natural History has a series of apps attached to it. Among them you have Dinosaurs Iphone App, Creatures of Light, Pterosaurs: The Card Game, MicroRangers, Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs, The Power of Poison: Be a Detective, Bernard Family Hall of the North American Mammals, and Beyond Planet Earth. You can check them out on this link http://www.amnh.org/apps. However, here I’m specifically reviewing the app called Explorer. The Explorer is an app supported by Bloomberg Philantropies, founded by the ex-mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. The app has the main objective of presenting the museum to the largest possible amount of people in the world. In this sense, the user has two options of function: one with the user browsing at the museum and other with the user browsing outside.

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Digital History and YouTube Findings

Welcome! The class started!

The first talk set the foundation of main discussions and concerns of theory and practice in Digital History. After some basic reflections, I decided to dig on YouTube sources that delve on our main subject in this site. Interesting channels to subscribe are the following ones:

All of them share videos of TED Talks, conversations, interviews, speeches and lectures of professionals, scholars, writers and researchers discussing and developing together the meaning, challenges, pros and cons of Digital History.

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