Unit 7: Digitizing and Sourcing Images and Text (and Video)

A Lucky Day, Thanks to Grammy

How much was that old glass jar that my husband had inherited from his grandmother worth? I turned to eBay a commercial site, https://www.ebay.com/

It might be worth $6 to $65. Mostly what he and I learned from the search is that it was a Lucky Joe Louis Bank. 

Louis was a boxer and his face was used on the bank after he became heavyweight champion of the world in 1937. Taking that info and going on an antique class collector site, https://www.kovels.com/collectors-questions/lucky-joe-bank.html  I learned that the jar had once held Nash's prepared mustard and was sold in grocery stores in Pennsylvania (where Grammy lived) and elsewhere as a promotion item. This was after the Depression. People needed a reason to buy. The jar had a dual purpose: it provided food and a place to put your (scarce) money. Grammy kept the jar on her dresser and gave a coin to grandkids who might be especially good. This foray into material culture was started because we had an old piece of stuff on the shelf. What we learned from both commercial and collector websites was an example of the knowledge gained quickly

On eBay, which says it facilitates "consumer to consumer and business to business" sales, it's not always clear whether your seller is a collector, a business, or someone cleaning out the basement. You hope they abide by the company's stated good-faith policy. There's a place to make complaints on the site, which means unethical sellers can be barred from using it. 

Another commercial website that is in the progress of taking over the world (in the opinion of some) is Amazon. Most of us look at several website when we are buying or selling, so here's what I got when I looked for Lucky Joe Louis on Amazon:  

https://www.amazon.com/Antique-1930s-Mustard-Lucky-Joe/dp/B004AAOPUC 

Joe was worth $30 and up. We decided not to sell it. But if it gets to $500, then - yes. 

The "search" function on Google or a commercial website or any website today is probably the most time-saving breakthrough on the web EVER.

OTHER SOURCES

Google owns more than 200 companies https://www.investopedia.com/investing/companies-owned-by-google/, including YouTube, a video-sharing website. The search function is crucial there, too. You go there to learn something (like units in this class or running tips), but also for random info that can only be classified as entertainment, such as cartoon and video. Type in "workplace meltdowns" and spend the next hour saying "ohmigod" and "oh no" and "holy whatever."

YouTube empowers ordinary people as well as experts to share their knowledge. How do you know who vets them? You don't. It is a user-generated website. How do you know what is fake and what not? You don't. (Yes, this comes from Wikipedia, but explains in one place well all the technologies and ways YouTube works : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube) 

YouTube was started by three former PayPal people. Now many of us can go on Amazon and use PayPal to pay for purchases. Companies and membership associations rely on PayPal to do transactions for a small amount of every purchase. 

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, often pops up first on Google searches.  But those who contribute info to the site may or may not be experts on the subject. Citations are there, but further research needs to be done by those searching for primary sources.

Facebook may have privacy problems lately, but that doesn't stop us from using it. It is the form of social media for sharing information at personal, group, neighborhood, national and international levels.

THOUGHTS ON IT ALL

"This exciting prospect of universal, democratic access to our cultural heritage should always be tempered by a clear-headed analysis of whether the audience for the historical materials is real rather than hypothetical," say Cohen and Rosenzweig. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/digitizing/ 

Digital searching most dramatically transforms access to collections, whether they are commercial websites or historical ones. Commercial websites make money. Historians have to justify can digitizing costs; a collection of personal papers that attracts very few researchers is costly, as C&R say in this chapter. The Library of Virginia, for example, has some personal papers described online, yet available only in the library. http://www.lva.virginia.gov/ 

The speed with which research can be done today from digital collections is astounding, although getting access to some data has become harder as firewalls have been put in place for security reasons and subscriptions to publications become the norm. 

Google's plan to create a library was welcomed by those who believe in a democratic web with information available to anyone, but getting things digitized is still a technical challenge.

As Cohen and Rosenzweig note, document markup predated the Internet. Before computerized typesetting, there were copy editors. There still are, but instead of using pencils they use computers and the Microsoft Tracker function to edit, leaving a trail so that changes can be tracked to the person who made them (and heads can roll when there is a serious mistake).

Machines can do much more. Even publications like The Washington Post use computer programs to "write" some stories, notably sports scores. This eliminates the need for the old film version of reporter calling in a score to a copy aide, who then enters it into story.  Scores get "fed" into a database, entered in a column, sorted and placed in context in a sports text. Computerized typesetting revolutionized printing.

Examples of materials I have digitized

1.  At right is a page from an American Historic Buildings Survey (HABS), the 1936 field notes on an Alexandria house. The original field notes, which are small notebooks filled with grid paper, are kept in stored collections at the Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/ A visitor must specifically request them. These survey reports are not available online or digitized, although some sketches from select buildings can be found on the library's website. Field notes are fragile and can only be photographed with approved cameras at select tables in full view of librarians. The sketch here shows the measurements of a door fame, pediment and step. From examining this, an architectural historian may be able to determine its age. The HABS was the nation's first federal preservation program in 1933. Its purpose was to document America's architectural heritage.  https://www.nps.gov/hdp/habs/

2. The photo at left is from an Alexandria family collection. It may have been taken in the late 1880s. The style of dress and hair on the woman must be examined to determine that, as well as the quality of the photo itself. The family member who provided this said he believes it is his great, great grandmother as a young woman in her twenties, or an aunt. He is reluctant to remove the photo backing (paper) to learn more information at this time. This black-and-white photo with white frame is about 3 inches wide by 5 inches high. The family member says he sees resemblance to family members today.

From  consulting sources such as this 

http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/everyday-clothes.html , I learned that dresses in the Victorian era most often were two pieces, blouse separate from skirt, and that collars and cuffs were detachable. From this source https://www.uvm.edu/landscape/dating/clothing_and_hair/1880s_hair_women.php I learned this hair style was popular in the 1870s and as late as early 1900s.

Other sources of digital material: Deeds and will in courthouses are sometimes digitized. Boxes of fragile papers can be digitized so that the information is available to future researchers, but this takes technical skill and money -- the latter, the main obstacle.

FINAL PROJECT

I'm compiling a list of 20 cemeteries from sources in Balch Library, looking for photos on Creative Commons and cemetery websites, and trying to contact people connected with some cemeteries to get permission to use the photos in a story map.