The Rosenzweig and Cohen chapter discusses the utilization of history “gateways” to direct an audience as well as looking at similar websites and communities. They advise contacting webmasters and asking for advice and reciprocal links. This seems very logical, and I am wondering if there is competition for audience in the web environment. Are similar sites likely to want to share their audience?

My question this week is regarding one my items. I have a technical report that I am scanning and transcribing. It has graphic in it and some mathematical formulas, diagrams and charts. I think that these will be lost in the pages of the item. I am not sure of the best way to present this report in digital form.

The link to my project is http://www.timolatdressage.net/omeka

The Elings and Waibel article briefly mention folksonomies as a potential “user friendly and affordable metadata generation option particularly within the museum world. This grassroots approach to tagging appears to be most commonly associated with social sites such as flickr and delicious where there are no apparent descriptive standards or controlled vocabulary. I wonder if it would be possible attempt the institution of reliable standards and controlled vocabularies for folksonomies.

In his chapter “What Nothing Says”, Weinberger discusses tagging. His discussion covers how people tag items particularly in reference to tagging of items on the web by non-professionals. He questions if people tag for themselves to refind pages or to help others find pages. I wonder if most people realize that they are “tagging” items, particularly visual media. Very often items are titled, thereby creating tags. Were there to be some formal understanding of tagging and metadata amongst flickr users (for example) I wonder if their tagging and titling and use of metadata would change.

Rosenzweig raises what i think is one of the most important aspects of digitization and that is the importance of metadata, he writes “First-time digitizers typically overestimate the production costs and underestimate the intellectual costs such as those associated with making the right selections and providing the most helpful metadata.”

Do we know who are the people most commonly doing the digitization? Often librarians but how do we convey the importance of metadata to the non librarians?

My other question that neither reading really addressed is data migration, when is it necessary to migrate our data to new storage mechanisms or new formats, is there any general rule for data migration to ensure digital “permanence”?

A crucial part of website design used to take in to consideration the common screen resolution of the average user. Do we still design for certain hardware specifications?

It appears that one of the chief concerns of historians is what is going to happen to the historical materials that have been digitized. Cohen asks the question “what will people?” Why does this become a different issue than print format? Several of the readings as well as the video lecture discuss concerns over text or data mining of electronic resources for historical applications. If anything it would seem that the non-linear format allows for further contextualization of historical interpretation and allowing the reader to follow the historical inquiry process would be only beneficial to any audience.

Vaidhyanathan seems to take a rather anti-copyright stance throughout her book, regularly equating American copyright regulations and those who pursue and enforce them with big corporations and monopolies that exist to stymie and squash artistic endeavors, expression and inquiry, particularly pertaining to the digital world.
She seems to want people to take a moral approach to sharing intellectual property.

Specifically in reference to databases she describes the process as intellectual mercantilism, likening it to British East India Company (p166). While database fees are exorbitant and perhaps exclusive, considerable resources and “brow sweat” go into creating and maintaining and supporting these databases. Before we vilify these giants for stifling inquiry and progress, I would like to see an in depth objective analysis of the costs that are incurred to provide database services. Is the problem the middle man?

I found Rosenzweig’s discussion of historical scholarship to present a much more compelling case for a more open source approach to that sector of intellectual property.

For my topic I would like to research the history/impact of the horse in the New England/New York area as this topic ties into other professional interests of mine. I am interested in the transition of the horse from laborer to athlete. I would like to include the evolution of the training processes as well, I have not really settled on a time range for this due to the varied chronological and geographical factors that have influenced the sport horse industry.