Project Proposal

Most people see the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a state educational institution. Many within that those people see it also as a business with investors, a structure, revenues...However, very few see it as a community. Indeed, just like any other community, it has the privilege of having an history. It is true that constituents in the University of Massachusetts Amherst stay for an average period of 4 to 10 years and leave. However, some constituents if not the University itself, have gone through events or moments that we should consider worth sharing with future constituents or just consider preserving for the sake of the community, business or educational institution, depending on how a person sees it.
I did not get this idea until I walked from the elevators to the computer common at the basement of the W.E.B duBois library. By the red Bricks columns, I saw a piece of a news paper article about the first UMass football team. I went on the web and I could not find it, even on the UMass web site. Then, I got this idea of digitizing documents such as that news paper article with the picture the the first UMass football team or the very first class to graduate from the University ( in1868=not sure), the picture is posted by the fine Arts Center, or the first female student to graduate with the class of 1905.
Furthermore, one of the advantages of new media is its accessibility and openness to an unlimited number of people. With this I am assuming that there are people out there who have pieces of UMass history and would be eager to share it. I want in this project to give the opportunity those Alumni, journalists, former professors who have videos, pictures, text documents...upload them or contact us in case they want to share it (However, the content must be validated first before it can be published) and possibly comment on it.

In fact my target group is to be between 17 year olds to 75year olds, who I consider to either be future members of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's community, current students or former members of the UMass community. For the structure, I want the page to be very simple (Google simple) but with a UMass Amherst maroon theme of color. There will be a long search inquiry box; few navigation buttons on top of the page or right below the search inquiry box (home, sports, physical plan,buildings, people, events...)

When it comes to the costs, I really do not know how much time, human resources, and above money will have to be invested for the realization of this digitization project. But in term of limitations, I just don't know how much of what is out there to digitize, how much access I will get to current UMass artifacts (archives) and if their digitization will be allowed.

May God help us!

Digitizing The Past

In this Twenty first century, no one can argue that the use of New Media is already and becoming even more dominant across all scientific fields, and thus history. However, it was not until 1994, four years after the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau that Morris Pierce created the first known to be a historical web site. Since then, prestigious museums, campus universities, towns and cities across the world, societies and companies have been using the New Media as a tool to provide access as well as to promote themselves to the open world. In order to accomplish this, it requires a large amount of material digitizing and archiving.
Nevertheless, digitizing the past has its advantages and disadvantages. Using these examples below, I will illustrate and analyze the benefits and drawbacks of digitizing certain historical materials.

First, I looked at the digitized book "1984” by George Orwell at Google books. One great advantage of digitizing books is that the public can get access to the content at no cost. Instead of stacking books at home, now a USB disc is enough to hold millions of books. And furthermore, a web user can read the reviews about the book first before purchasing or sacrifice time to read it. However, there is not entirety of content. In the case of 1984 and Who Governs (Robert Dahl), there are chapters missing. Google books only provides 2/3 of the book content in order to encourage the reader to purchase the book. For other institutions, you will have to be a member or become a member in order to get access to the full content of the book (or download it).

Second, I looked at the the Open Content Alliance Website. The Open Content Alliance is a non-profit and a collaborative organizational group which helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material for universal access. But when you look at the Open Content Alliance goals from an writer's (author) prospective, that is bad news. Authors should worry about the issue of legitimation and authority. Digitizing books puts the authors' copyright at great risk. A hard copy of any historical material can hardly be copied. However, a digitized version of anything can be duplicated, pirated, illegally stolen, sabotaged and destroyed with just a smileful click of mouse.

Third, I looked at the the Louvre Museum website. Every historical material the museum possesses is pretty much digitized. The material is offered in more than three different languages. This is tremendously advantageous in term of making knowledge available and reaching out to those who cannot afford the cost of a travel. However, the feeling someone gets from contemplating the “Venus de Milo”“or the Taj Mahal cannot simply be digitized. The digital material buries the human and object connection. This will of experiencing historical artifacts first hand vanishes.

Wikipedia

To do a search on the Web, different people use different websites or search engines. However, the results from those different search engines are at a large percentage similar; mainly because of the commonality of the content, popularity among web users, and uniqueness of the word or contents being searched. Among the most popular websites that appear as a result of any search, the Wikis are very omnipresent. The wikis are websites in which any web user can post, edit, cut or delete content on any subject (well, except personal ones).

In this blog post, I will examine the discussion and history tabs of two Wikipidia entries. And Feel the need to you as the reader that I do not give credits to any wikipedia entry unless there is a verifiable source of the entry. Also when i comes to humans (as emotional beings) there is no such thing as objectivity. All entries, posts, editing...are somehow biased.

My first subject was the Federal Reserve System. What I have noticed at first, was that the content on the matter was quite abundant. All the part the content were editable without any demand of membership or log in requirement. Nevertheless, I was warned that the IP address of my computer was going to be recorded.

While analyzing the discussion tab of the Federal Reserve System content, I and other users noticed that the very first paragraph was misleading, the information was inaccurate. Many web users also complained about the large amount of information provided for just that one topic.

When it comes the History tab, the content has been edited over 288 times, and each sub-part of the content has been edited at least 4 times. This article ranked 2686 in traffic on en.wikipedia.org.

The second discussion and history Wikipedia entry that I analyzed was the Knights Templar. In the discussion of the knights Templar, the main topic in the discussion page was the date in which the Knights Templar were burned alive. The main debate was based in the fact that in that time, either the Gregorian calendar or the Julian calendar was used. Consequently, the use or either calendar would change the date of the Poor Knights Templar's persecution. I also noticed an important but debatable missing subject which is the charge of sodomy by the Pope clement the fifth on the Knights Templar. The history of the Knights Templar entry was edited 162 times and based on the statistics, the web-page has so far 526 watchers.