Technology
Digital technology tools powerfully arrange ideas and promote unique analysis for the presentation and access to historical knowledge online. Some tools exist for basic web development, like WYSIWYG HTML-editor Adobe Dreamweaver. Other tools create more interactive digital history, such as Databases, which provide greater capacity for information storage and retrieval in a definable way. Databases with features like Structured Query Language (SQL) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) arrange materials in a formal manner and allow precise searching for keywords, dates, and other data characteristics. The online article "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" used XML for presenting and connecting evidence with detailed historiographical discussions. The Valley of the Shadow project also employed XML to convert all of the archive's letters, diaries, and newspapers for full text searching capabilities.
The Differences Slavery Made also used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze and understand the spatial arrangement of social structures. For the article, Ayers and Thomas created many new maps through GIS technology to produce detailed images of Augusta and Franklin counties never before possible. GIS and its many components remain helpful for studying history and visualizing change over time.
The Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project at MIT develops robust, open source tools that enable access, management, and envisaging digital assets. Among the many tools built by SIMILE, the Timeline tool, which employs a DHTML-based AJAXy widget, allows digital historians to create dynamic, customizable timelines for visualizing time-based events. The Timeline page on the SIMILE website declares that their tool "is like Google Maps for time-based information." Additionally, SIMILE's Exhibit tool boasts a customizable structure for sorting and presenting data . Exhibit, written in Javascript, creates interactive, data-rich web pages without the need for any programming or database creation knowledge.
Creating visualizations of textual elements open new interpretations and new uses of historical data. Text-analysis software like TokenX, developed at the University of Nebraska's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, generates word-frequency lists and word clouds to illustrate language usage and word significance within historical resources. The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) based in Canada has also developed a web portal for experimentation with text analysis tools. On del.icio.us, an online bookmarking and research tool, tag clouds visually depict the frequency and importance of user-generated tags. These tags promote new modes of learning, exploration, research, and communication that foster the production of knowledge in a more efficient manner by elucidating related subjects and making connections based on related information.
Read more about this topic: Digital History
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)