The Coming Global Digital Super-pocalypse™

Are all these tricks and tools a curse and not a blessing?  Jerome P. McDonough says in a Science Daily article on the subject, that our reliance on digital will render vast amounts of data unusable in a relatively short period of time.  While its easy to whip up hysteria by pointing to the possible loss of 369 exabytes worth of data, its also perhaps a bit misleading.  The problems of digital preservation seem to mostly be problems of willpower and foresight, not technology.  Like any analog format, if a record is not kept in a controlled and meticulous way, then it may not survive.  What is not even calculable is the innumerable "exabytes" of paper records that do not survive for this very reason.

Image courtesy of Kent State University

What is surprising when discussing problems in digital preservation is the potential ease of their solubility.  Compared to the shear effort taken in physically maintaining a massive collection of say, microfilm, with temperature and  possible toxic waste concerns, the updating of file formats seems to be relatively easy.  The problem of course is doing so en masse to a large collection without losing metadata or quality.  But those problems will be solved as the rest of the field technically evolves.  All in all, despite real problems, I predict a bright future in the realm of digital preservation.

Image courtesy of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections project was designed to present information about and digitized documents relating to the Polar Bear Expedition of 1918 in Russia.  As well as that basic task, it was also designed to track what was useful in building future online archives.  Using web analytics to track user choices, the Polar Bear collection came to some conclusions about user interaction.  With a simple comment feature, the site enabled users to suggest corrections and give further information about specific items.   Bookmarking, which seems somewhat redundant in a world where every browser has that ability, was less successful.  An attempt was made to replicate Amazon.com's link suggestion system, but many of the users did not even notice it.  The biggest flop was a login system, the failure of which Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel would attribute to the sites newness and lack of a large user base.  The lack of any login system on the sites modern main page would seem to indicate that it was not to be.  This is likely a result of "login overload" that many internet users were feeling a few years ago, when every site wanted to be the new "myspace."  The most important feature and only reason for the site's existence, the digital collection itself, was deemed "very important" by 5 of 6 surveyed users.  One user marked it "very unimportant", confirming again my own personal theory that between 10-20% of any given survey have no idea what they are doing.

Image courtesy of the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection

The site today, seen above, seems a bit dry and lacking in a presentational flair that many sites have since attempted.  But it stands as an important step in the creation of academic web archives.





  

Trumbull-White House

The Trumbull-White house has a storied history.  It was originally built by architect George Bottler for William and Pearl Trumbull in the Colonial revival style.  William Trumbull was one of the first auto dealers in Spokane.  Pearl Trumbull attempted successfully to make Spokane "Lilac City" and was one of the founders of the Spokane Lilac Parade.

  Between the 1940s and 1960s, the house was occupied by Dr. Elizabeth White, who was one of Spokane's early female medical doctors.  Her life as a civic leader and president of the Deaconess Hospital was an inspiration to many Spokanite women and men alike.

{still trying to find anything on this house.  Not much info out there}  

Spokane Parental School very Rough draft.

Built not to imprison or punish, but to educate, the Spokane Parental School was an innovation in education and corrections.  In 1907, the city board of education authorized the construction of a school for wayward or delinquent boys between the ages of six and fifteen.  Before then, there was no such facility for discipline challenged youths, with many likely to end up in a prison cell.  The site of the school was chosen along peaceful Latah creek.  Famous local architect Albert Held offered his services for free, providing a Dutch Colonial revival plan for the building itself.  Donations were received from all around the city, and in 1908 the school was completed.

Students of the school took advantage of natural features of the area.  Canoeing, fishing, and farming attracted the attention of the students.  The troubled youths were even given animals to raise, and land to work.  The school was touted as a success for many years.  But by 1940, its costs had ballooned, causing some to wish for its closure.  In 1943 the school was finally made victim of financial scarcity, and was closed.  

The school grounds and outbuildings have since been converted into a housing development.  In 2001, a local attorney bought the school with intent on restoring it to its former Dutch Colonial grandeur.

Treason, Trials, and Teaching Archives

                        

The above word jumble comes from a search into the Old Bailey Online project's records for the word "treason".  Then, using zotero to save the search, I exported the data to VoyeurTools.org to do an instant search through the results.  This was the desired result of the Data Mining With Criminal Intent project, headed by Dan Cohen, to make the tools for intricate data visualization and research available to everyone.  The Old Bailey project was an obvious choice, as it was the largest single repository of non-elite stories available.

The Old Bailey project had a very ambitious goal, to digitize millions of pages of documentation stretching back to the 1600s.  Never fully complete, the project has spawned countless projects from the high school to doctoral level.  While not perfect, the level of accuracy is commendable, with less than 1 error in 3000 words.

Some scanned documents are old and hard to read.
Courtesy of the Old Bailey Online project

The scans are not perfect, as indicated in the above image.  But the site gives a machine read version as well, which can be cross checked with the scan.  The easy use of the project has enabled many interesting and creative projects to be built around it, such as this one, which encouraged students to do comparisons of results after changing a single search input.

Data visualization is something we tackled a bit in our class in the Dead of Spokane Project.  The tools we used were just the tip of the iceberg, as is shown in Shawn Allen's interesting article on the subject.  He takes us from the early history of charts and graphs to the present Renaissance of interactive digital visualizations.  

The unemployment rates for people like myself (white, male, college graduates)
Image courtesy of the New York Times.

The above visualization calculates and shows the unemployment levels for different groups of people.  While people like myself have relatively low levels of unemployment, if I were to change a single value (race), the rate doubles.  Does this indicate that racism still exists at high levels among employers?  Or is it a mere accident of geography, with minorities more likely to live in economically depressed urban areas?  The visualization tools used by the NYTimes presents the figures in an interesting and stark way.                                       

Here is little tool that Zach found.  It allows you to edit, share and remix web videos and re-post them.  I dont see a way to download the videos, so Im not sure I can be of any use for SpokaneHistorical.  But it is a fun way to mess with videos online, by adding all sorts of little popups.  All the little popups, from the title, twitter stuff, google map, the jump cut at 00:14, to the annoying loop at the end was added by me in the tool.  It might not be useful for this video, but it might have use for instructional videos or that sort of thing.  The tool allows anyone to re-mix the video by clicking on the little recycle symbol at the bottom.  Give it a try.

https://popcorn.webmaker.org/

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and Convent

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and Convent is a landmark of religious history in Spokane.  Finished in 1901, the Church was a marvel of Late Gothic Revival architecture.  It is build on the grounds that used contain home of Chester Ide, the same man for whom the neighborhood known as Ide’s Addition was named after. 

In 1890, the Catholic Parish of Spokane County built a wooden framed building on the site of the future St. Joseph’s to facilitate Spokane’s growing Catholic community.  By the end of the decade, the building had not aged well, and plans for a new church were drawn up.  The architectural firm known as Preusse & Zittel, Julius A. Zittel being the official state architect of Washington, offered their services pro-bono. After four months of construction the building was completed on October 27^th, 1901.  In 1905, a school was added, with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Scranton, Pennsylvania to take over instruction.  In 1908, the structure was again remodeled with even more Gothic Revival architectural influence. 

A 1923 fire in the school building damaged the third floor badly, and in 1924, a convent was opened on the property to house the teaching nuns, which was later turned into a Parish Center with classrooms and offices.  The original school building was demolished and eventually that part of the property was turned into retirement homes for senior Spokanites.  In 1928, a Gymnasium was added to the property across the street, which would be used by the Church until the late 1960s. 

St. Joseph’s was only the second Catholic Church built in the city of Spokane, and it served to solidify the relationship between Spokane and the growing Catholic faith.  It is still in operation today, and currently offers church services en Español in response to yet another growing Spokane community.   

The Washington Street Bridge

http://spokanehistorical.org/admin/items/show/id/266

Click the above link if you want to see it all in omeka format.

Text:

In 1908, the Washington Street Bridge was constructed over the Spokane River, to provide an avenue for the rapidly growing city’s population. The 242 feet bridge was constructed by the Wallace-Coates Engineering Company of Chicago. They used a series of ribbed concrete arches for stability. The bridge’s costs inflated a great deal during construction. One Spokane city councilmen reportedly said that if they ever spent that much again, “the council would never be able to bond the city for another dollar for any purpose.” Nevertheless, the bridge was completed in 1909. 

In 1910, a group of Spokane businesses offered Harry Houdini an undisclosed cash sum to perform one of his daring magic tricks on the Washington Street Bridge. Houdini reportedly had chains placed around his legs and his hands put in handcuffs, before plummeting to the Spokane River below. Houdini reportedly sunk deep into the freezing waters for a moment, before triumphantly arising to the surface unchained. The marketing stunt was a great success, and marks the Washington Street Bridge’s only claim to fame. 

The bridged continued in relatively uninterrupted use until the late 1970s, when cracks and holes were discovered in the concrete superstructure. Weight limits and other stopgap measures were proposed, but in the end the decision was made to re-build it entirely, and by 1985 nothing remained of the original structure. Before its demolition, the Washington Street Bridge had the honor of being the oldest concrete bridge in the State of Washington. 

Cant figure out how to add an audio track, so here is one turned into a video.

I suppose I got a bit carried away.  But these videos are so much fun to create.  Hopefully I can show some of you some of the tricks next week. 

Instant Peer Review

Online sleuthing casts doubt on 'Gospel of Jesus' Wife'


First two stop texts incoming, but before that, here is an interesting case of the web being used as instant international peer review, and also of a means for forgery.

[clarification needed]

Wikipedia's Definition of Copyright
Courtesy of Wikipedia

I want you to imagine a world in which George Lucas lost control of Star Wars in 2005.  The original film, re-dubbed "A New Hope" for its VHS release, is released into the public domain.  Anyone can remake, re-edit, re-write and re-interpret the film.  The story is ripped from the aging, corporate culture of Lucasfilm Limited™ and given to the masses.  By 2011, the entire original trilogy is released to the public domain.  The possibilities are nearly endless.  George Lucas' dreary "prequel" trilogy is just one in a sea of interpretations, having to compete in the free market of ideas.    

That was the world envisioned by the founders, who in the 1790 Copyright Act, laid out a relatively relaxed copyright regime, in which a person's work was under protection for 14 years, with a possible extension of another 14 years if renewed.  Since then, the amount of time a copyright lasts has ballooned to the life of the author plus 75 years, effectively denying us access to nearly everything created in the middle to late 20th century.  

The creative commons is an attempt to re-balance the scales in the other direction, with content creators freely waving some of their rights to definitive, ultra-long lasting copyright protection, in favor of a sharing regime.  While not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it is at least an attempt to come to terms with the increasingly draconian laws being passed on this issue.

When it comes to the history space on the web, Cohen and Rosenzweig lay out the basic ideas of copyright protection with the idea of protecting yourself from liability.  Historians, by the nature of their craft, are going to use materials and objects under some form of copyright protection.  Protecting yourself from charges of idea-theft and plagiarism are long traditions for historians already.  What is new is the way that the latest forms of digital media and historical presentation fit into all this.  Cohen and Rosenzweig give out basic information about copyright, mostly urging historians to be cautious and double check your rights with regards to source materials before use.  

Mark Helprin, conservative commentator and author has a different take on the subject, and writes in the New York Times that copyrights should be forever.  His argument, which was followed by a lengthy rebuttal by Lawrence Lessig, boils down to the idea that content creators should exist in the same space as major corporations and be able to benefit from their creations in perpetuity.  He makes the claim that not only the children, but the great great great great great great great great grandchildren of the authors should have every right to the material profits as the original creator.  In this he makes a stupefying analogy to slavery and other similarly overwrought comparisons.  The torrent of negative reaction to the piece (750,000 angry comments) spawned a seemingly hurt but still defiant Helprin to pen Digital Barbarism: A Writers Manifesto , in which he intends to speak for all content creators who demand that works be placed in perpetual lock-down.

The dizzying maze of copyright rules and regulations governing so-called "orphan works" (in which the copyright holder cannot be found) have prevented a huge treasure of unreleased Jazz recordings from seeing the light of day.  This sort of issue can underscore the need for clarity and reform in the copyright arena.  Digital historians, far from being sued, are far more likely to refuse to post content over the fear of litigation.  Not being lawyers, they rightly do not wish to enter the confused and somewhat backward world of copyrights, where an iPod filled with pirated music can be worth eight billion dollars and where unlawfully using a Michael Jackson song could possibly get you more prison time than killing him.  

Still, I think digital historians should calm down and look at all the great alternatives available for their use.  Historians are low on the copyright regime's radar, and are very unlikely to suffer legally from it, unless they do some clearly inappropriate things.  Take me for instance.  Remember the Star Wars idea I posited in the beginning of this post?  I stole it from this wonderful C.G.P. Grey Youtube video:

Hopefully this belated citation will keep the angry copyright gods at bay...