Digital Artifact is a great invention? It depends.

Following the prompt on the WordPress, I went to the DH Sample Book website, where Archive, Visualization, Mapping, Digital edition, Network analysis, Textual analysis, and Audio analysis are seven different categories the archives fall under. Under Archive, I browsed the 3 projects, the OldWeather, Lincoln at 200 and Database of Indigenous Peoples in North America.

Since digital artifacts provide a tremendous network platform. On that platform, users can easily find the information they are looking for with the help of tags and metadata. In this case, a huge database is accessible to almost every user. The internet gathered all materials which shatter all over the world on the same website. Instead of taking the 15-or-more-hour flight to see the original archive, one now only need 1 second to get all related digital archives because tags and metadata grouped them together. Furthermore, since a lot of important archives are so antiquated and fragile that they are generally inaccessible to the public. With the help of digital technology, we can get one copy version in our laptop.  The digital artifact is also very important since it puts the images and context side by side to give readers a much more clear view of what is going on. the perfect integration of image and context

However, one disadvantage appears when we are looking at a digital document, like journals. As time passes, words on ancient archives became blurred and unrecognizable. With the pixel problems, scholars sometimes still need the actual archive for research study, although the digital version is provided online. “Old Weather” displays a photograph of a “logbook” from a ship that became trapped in ice. As the original document traced back to the late 19th century, the digital artifact gave us more difficulties to understand what it meant. A poor understanding of its meaning will directly lead to the failure of research study.  Logbook for the Jeannette

During this week, I found it is really hard to find one interesting title for my exhibit. I want to make my exhibit look colorful and attractive . In this case, I prefer to use portraits and oil paintings rather than maps and journals. However, due to the limited databases, I have to change my title frequently to make my images match the title.


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