Barbara Natanson in Worth a Billion Words? Libary of Congress Pictures Online, an article in the June 2007 Journal of American History shows the power of the web in historical research. Natanson takes one picture which has a very cryptic description in the LOC description and gives a narrative to the subject, the photographer and the time frame of the photo. The digitizing of the photograph allows her to add context to an otherwise sterile artifact. She makes the point that the digitization of these images allows many more people to look at them and provide this context. I think what she is saying is that although a picture may be worth a 1000 words,it is only by putting it into the correct context are we able to get the right 1000 words.
She later shows that photographs, once digitized, can be viewed in much more detail than is possible when only shown in a book. Using the techniques we learned in this class historians can make the photos accessible to more people and highlight the area of the photo and the particular reason the photo is important to a historian's thesis.
Her last section describe a process of looking at over 100,000 photographs made by the Farm Security Administration. She says that digitization allows a collaborative effort which then allows different meta data to be provided to all of the different photos allowing for a systematic review of them that is not available now. This sounds exactly like the vision for the collaborative individual collections that GMU is trying to achieve with OMEKA. The technology to do this exists, the problem is the definition or ordering of the meta data to make it useful.
Great article that shows that digitization and web collaboration go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly to make a great history sandwich on the web. (Oh that was bad, but I couldn't resist.)
As you can tell I am taking a break from working on my web site by working on my paper for my other course. I came across this article and thought it was interesting.
Good Luck to everyone on getting your final web sites done. They all looked pretty good to me on Thursday.
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