The Way We Write History Has Changed (theatlantic.com) 48
A deep dive into an archive will never be the same. From an essay: Instead of reading papers during an archival visit, historians can snap pictures of the documents and then look at them later. Ian Milligan, a historian at the University of Waterloo, noticed the trend among his colleagues and surveyed 250 historians, about half of them tenured or tenure-track, and half in other positions, about their work in the archives. The results quantified the new normal. While a subset of researchers (about 23 percent) took few (fewer than 200) photos, the plurality (about 40 percent) took more than 2,000 photographs for their "last substantive project." The driving force here is simple enough. Digital photos drive down the cost of archival research, allowing an individual to capture far more documents per hour. So an archival visit becomes a process of standing over documents, snapping pictures as quickly as possible.
Some researchers organize their photos swiping on an iPhone, or with an open-source tool named Tropy; some, like Alex Wellerstein, a historian at Stevens Institute of Technology, have special digital-camera setups, and a standardized method. In my own work, I used Dropbox's photo tools, which I used to output PDFs, which I dropped into Scrivener, my preferred writing software. These practices might seem like a subtle shift -- researchers are still going to collections and requesting boxes and reading papers -- but the ways that information is collected and managed transmute what historians can learn from it. There has been, as Milligan put it, a "dramatic reshaping of historical practice." Different histories will be written because the tools of the discipline are changing.
Some researchers organize their photos swiping on an iPhone, or with an open-source tool named Tropy; some, like Alex Wellerstein, a historian at Stevens Institute of Technology, have special digital-camera setups, and a standardized method. In my own work, I used Dropbox's photo tools, which I used to output PDFs, which I dropped into Scrivener, my preferred writing software. These practices might seem like a subtle shift -- researchers are still going to collections and requesting boxes and reading papers -- but the ways that information is collected and managed transmute what historians can learn from it. There has been, as Milligan put it, a "dramatic reshaping of historical practice." Different histories will be written because the tools of the discipline are changing.
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I think you're missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
You no longer need to spend hours and hours pouring over the real documents. That massively increases your reach as a historian. If you missed something on an archival visit you can just refer to your pictures, and they'll be good enough quality to be usable. This will massively reduce inaccuracies in historical writing.
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You don't even need to read the history. You can just plop together collages of other people's earlier impressions.
I'd say it is 'the end of history' but that's sort of cliche' these days.
We will drown in seas if bitmaps that nobody ever looks at.
No, it really isn't progress.
No pics on twitter -- it still happened :-) (Score:2)
The rest of us have know for years the many advantages of having a digital camera ... It's about time historians finally discovered digital imaging. But, I guess when you live in the past it takes a little more time to catch up with technology.
Actually historians have been digitizing documents and artwork for decades. One example: "In 1994, IBMers used digital imaging, distributed processing and new database software to help the 500-year-old Vatican Library—which houses some of Western civilization’s most ancient and precious documents—use technology to dramatically extend its library services to a scholarly community around the globe."
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/histor... [ibm.com]
Sorry, the "rest of you" aren't groundbreaking, you were
Time to do a "Library of Alexandria"? (Score:2)
Invite or require researchers to provide copies of their photos to library, essentially out-sourcing digitization.
The idea being future researchers could just request that a copy be sent to them, under whatever non-disclosure rules the institution requires.
I would think the problem's quality control (Score:2)
Re:I would think the problem's quality control (Score:4, Interesting)
When dealing with antiquities, you don't sift. You store everything, whether it seems relevant/helpful/useful or not. Storing information has a cost so close to zero now that it's unconscionable not to do so.
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Invite or require researchers to provide copies of their photos to library, essentially out-sourcing digitization.
+1
Also require upload to someplace like archive.org for a central repository available free of charge to the public. +10
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Also require upload to someplace like archive.org for a central repository available free of charge to the public. +10
This is a great idea for materials that are unencumbered.
Some archive materials are restricted-access, typically because the original donor of the archives placed restrictions on access for a period of time.
Others are encumbered by copyright or other issues.
In such cases the institution may allow researchers to photograph the materials subject to them signing a non-disclosure or conditional-disclosure agreement that would prevent them from providing copies to others outside of their research team.
N people to take the same picutures - efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:N people to take the same picutures - efficient (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably, but researchers usually have some kind of funding for their specific project and you'd have to collect funds from many projects over a long period of time to scan the entire archive. The same goes for transcription, it would be a lot easier afterwards but who's footing the initial cost. Many archives operate on a shoestring budget with volunteers, because it's so obscure. Take project Gutenberg, they have 60000 eBooks but only ~470 have had over 1000 downloads and that's for stories. Historians could end up looking at records that maybe five people look at in a year - or one person every five years.
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They could still scan-on-demand anything not already scanned, and then archive it, while just retrieving anything already scanned. This would require no up-front funding, and each page would only have to be scanned once.
Punch card rooms (Score:3)
I suspect that the effect will be similar to the removal of the punch card rooms that I am sure most Slashdotters can remember.
Once upon a time you needed to go to a place to program. And hang around for batch output. And you chatted with other programmers, exchanging ideas.
With less time in the archives, there is less random social interactions.
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Limited access time to documents with no opportunity to copy them truly focuses the mind during research. A year in the British Library for a postgrad in 99-00 taught me that.
Today I see a stamp-collector mindset to information gathering. People make copies of endless documents they'd like to read, but never actually get around to reading them.
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One of those downloads is likely me - I grabbed a big chunk of it when I needed some test-files I could use for an epub-manipulating program I was working on.
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(..) to scan the entire archive.
No need. Only on an as-used basis. That way time spent, wear & tear on scanning equipment (and storage requirements) would be modest at first. Visiting historians would determine what's 'interesting enough' to be scanned or not. Most popular / important documents would be digitized first, obscure documents would be digitized later if at all. Kind of like how old software is or isn't preserved across various archives - it gets done if enough people care about a specific item.
That approach would not co
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Or they tell me I cannot take photos, but will charge me to take photocopies (which are poorer quality than what I will do) and will be delivered in 5-10 days. and the next person who reads i
Re:N people to take the same picutures - efficient (Score:5, Informative)
I work in an institution with a research library. Your camera, while it may do an admirable job for you, really isn't going to cut it for the institution. A picture is only a picture without the proper metadata. Optimal lighting and focus are probably not achievable in our reading room. And that map over there, it's quite large (think the size a twin bedspread). Good luck with getting all of it with decent resolution to allow other researchers to zoom in on that detail in the lower right.
We have been digitizing our collection (which covers print, manuscripts, maps both hand drawn and printed, furniture, textiles, pottery, and a host of other stuff) for years and are ramping up to improve and speed up the process. We've purchased specialty scanners and have hired professional photographers. Once the image is captured, metadata about it must be created and attached to it by someone trained in doing just that.
The digitization schedules are based on both popularity and funding sources.
Re: N people to take the same picutures - efficien (Score:3)
British Library Digital archives (Score:2)
That happens already, the Atlantic article is already behind the times for Digital Preservation. A few years ago I did some Software Architecture design work for the
British Library digital collection. I conceived and designed the first digital Rosseta for holding the file specifications as metadata to satisfy the requirement for very long term preservation horizon and the ingesting software.
The BL digital collection a wide range of content ranging from 200 year old newspapers and books, the Cadensa sound ar
1994 - IBM - Vatican Library (Score:3)
... could not they go another step and take those photos once, in good quality, not in a rush, and make them available for download? ....
"In 1994, IBMers used digital imaging, distributed processing and new database software to help the 500-year-old Vatican Library—which houses some of Western civilization’s most ancient and precious documents—use technology to dramatically extend its library services to a scholarly community around the globe. This collaboration was an unprecedented effort to make a historically and culturally significant collection of precious illustrated mediaeval manuscripts accessible via the Internet.
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Duplication of effort (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't the archives digitize all of their content and make it available to the researchers instead of having every researcher make their own digitized copies?
Seems like it would pay for itself in access fees or whatever...
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Why don't the archives digitize all of their content and make it available to the researchers instead of having every researcher make their own digitized copies?
I knew someone would chime in with this.
You need some black-pilling. In this world? You want to rely on some institution? .... that just seems so naive to me. There are way too many hostile interests that are way too eager to fuck with things, limit access, revise history etc. for me to think this task should be neatly subsumed by some opaque academic or government entity. I am perfectly fine with a 'distributed' solution that crosses as many corporate, national, academic and media borders as is feasi
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I bet part of the answer is copyright, making research massively less efficient. I often research with Google Books and it's extremely frustrating. You can find the book you want but only have access to a few, if any, of the pages, even for books from the 1920s. And sometimes the cheapest and easiest way to see the whole book is to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to visit a library. There is no option to pay to have full online access. I suspect Google would provide such an option if only copyrig
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I bet part of the answer is copyright
This sounds a lot like how I acquire my music collection: check out CDs from the library and rip them to FLAC. This is perfectly legal for personal use. It becomes annoying when the CDs are scratched, so I wonder, why don't they keep the original CD and lend out burned copies instead? Or better yet, rip it once and then provide downloads? Of course they don't, because of copyright.
Re:Duplication of effort (Score:4, Informative)
Why don't the archives digitize all of their content and make it available to the researchers instead of having every researcher make their own digitized copies?
Because archives are HUGE. And unlike books where libraries can divide-and-conquer, each archive has to diligently scan all their paper documents as most of them exist in only one copy. OCR-ign is also not trivial, because a lot of archival documents have hand-written notes and/or complicated forms.
Eventually it'll be done, but don't expect this to happen within the next generation or so.
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I was hoping someone would bring up OCR.
Can anyone recommend good OCR software (preferably open source) for converting archival material to plaintext?
The article author mentions Dropbox's photo tools, but as far as I can tell, those would still be a PDF containing an image, not text, so the best the tools would be able to do would be to add PDF annotations. Scrivener was mentioned too, but a quick look at that doesn't show me any capabilities related to image to text conversion. If the historian's time in
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Thanks lostmyoldaccount.
I'm aware of Tesseract. I actually tried to do an OCR translation of the images in this digital book with Tesseract years ago. The accuracy was somewhere around 70% at the per-character level. The level of effort of proofreading & correcting the output would have been equivalent to manually transcribing the whole text. I didn't have the time for that.
But like I said, that was years ago. I see that Tesseract is actively maintained & the repo has recent commits. Maybe I'l
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And they probably are. But the archives are huge, and they can only digitize so much in a given time period. If an archive has a book you want to read, but they're not going to get to it for the next few years, then you either have to do without, or do it yourself.
And for archives that
Cost. (Score:2)
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Not to mention ultimately preserve the originals better, which one would think would be a key motivator.
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Some already do.
For example, the Bibliotheque Nacional de France has a great collection, and not only in French.
Here is a book that was authored around 965 C.E., in Iran, written in Arabic. It was by a famed astronomer, Al-Sufi (Azophi), and is an atlas of the sky and the 48 northern co
If only (Score:2, Offtopic)
If only someone would invent a machine that you could copy papers to another set of papers that you could take home and read later. That would be cool.
Great. So now can we crowdsource the Voynich book? (Score:2)
I see this as really good for those things of which there is only one, or at least only one is known to exist. Even leaving aside the access question, museums still get bombed and burn. Although documentation is a pale shadow compared to having the artifacts themselves, sometimes it's the best you can sustain.
So now can we turn the Voynich manuscript into a Cicada puzzle phone game and get it deciphered already?
They way we READ history has changed (Score:2)
They're taking pics of historical papers and documents so they can read them later. That would mean they way we READ history has changed...not the way history is written.
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They're taking pics of historical papers and documents so they can read them later. That would mean they way we READ history has changed...not the way history is written.
I'm sure somebody out there is "writing" history by printing out copies of the pictures for someone else to scan later. https://xkcd.com/1683/ [xkcd.com]
Headline (Score:3)
The way we research history has changed, just like everything has changed because of technology available.
I'm not at all convinced the way we write history will be any different.
History is already screwed (Score:2)
Pity the poor historian trying to get accurate information about anything remotely political in the Information Age. Itâ(TM)s going to take future historians a brief period of time to realize that sites like Wikipedia and most modern news sites are so biased as to be worthless.
Future historians will be removed from the controversy of our day and inherently wonâ(TM)t have a vested interest in one side or another in our arguments. Chances are they will dismiss these sources in their entirety rather