The four readings that I was charged with reading this week were a PDF file entitled ''What is Digital History?" by Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas III, ''It's All About Stuff'' by Tim Sherratt, ''Grappling With The Concept of Radical Trust'' which is a roundtable discussion and ''Frameworks and Lessons from the Public Participation in Science Research Report'' by Nina Simon. The first two readings deal with different projects that employed digital history in their making and allowed a minority group to come to terms with their past and learn more about it whereas the last two dealt more with the issue of museums and cultural sites sharing their information with the outside world or not. These two topics are important in that they emphasise the importance of digital history and the connexion that it has to the rest of the world.
The first reading was Seefeldt and Thomas' ''What is Digital History?'' This document was interesting in that it explained the importance of digital history through the brief description of relevant projects that employed digital history in some way. Two examples were the Library of Congress' American Memories project that collected photographs, letters and other artifacts that could be digitised and shared with the rest of the world and the National Archives' digitisation efforts. These are important in that these internationally recognised institutions employed different and groundbreaking methods of digital history to put their collections on the web for others to see. The importance lies in the fact that they have given other, smaller institutions a model to follow on their own digitising paths. Another example is the Texas Slavery Project done by the University of North Texas, which helps blacks in the US, not just those in Texas, come to terms with their ancestors' past and to learn more about that past. The efforts of the university have given a face to all of those blacks who would have been forgotten in the mists of time.
This brings me to the second reading, which is Sherratt's ''It's All About Stuff.'' The focus of the article is on a website called 'Invisible Australia,'' which deals with the fallacy of a completely segregated, ''white'' Australia in the late 19th to early 20th century. The site has the digitised images of original documents and photographs of all of the non-white residents that came to Australia from Syria, India and Canton China. One can click on the picture and the document will appear with all of the person's details on it. This gives all of these non-white immigrants to Australia a face and a presence in the country today. Another example is "Remember Me?'' which is a site that has photographs of children from the Holocaust years on it and the ability for someone to add information about the child in the photograph. These are available to anyone to do and this also gives these children a presence in this world. This is digital history used to give a profile and a personality to a flat image, a thing. That thing later comes alive as details and information are added to it as it is being shared with the world through the Web. Harvester and Zotero and mentioned as well as ways to collect and organise sets of data. Importance comes from the fact that these two websites previously listed could not be possible without these two sites or others like it to organise the data into a comprehensible set of information rather than binary nonsense. That information is later shared on the sites.
The third reading comes to mind now. This is the roundtable discussion named ''Grappling With the Concept of Radical Trust.'' Four directors with a basis in digital history are called to answer a question about radical trust and whether historic and cultural sites should trust their information to the outside world and put in the opinions of the masses. All but Jim Gardner, a senior scholar at the Smithsonian, agreed with the concept of partial to complete radical trust as beneficial to providing information for the people in a way Prometheus provided fire for man. It is still not widely accepted as many scholars wish not to associate with the uneducated masses as to what to show and not to show and what to study and what not to study and so on, but this is the future. The people will soon have the power to completely control what it is that they learn rather than go with what they are told by experts or family members. Sharing of information is vital to advancing man further into the future as they will be able to collaborate to a greater degree and, if man can do this, what is to stop them from averting wars with better diplomacy from greater knowledge of their own past?
Nina Simon's ''Greater Frameworks...'' is a discussion on the different models for institutions to use to usher in participation. It asks for the readers' input on which would be the most efficient model. This describes different models, such as contributory and co-creation as potential models to use on museums to put the crowd's opinions and knowledge out where others can see it. This ties in with the above paragraph on the third reading in its importance. Information must be shared so that gaps on the lower part of the history ladder can be filled in.
