Week 2 Response by Michael Ibarra

I found the "Getting Started Section" of Digital History to be absolutely fascinating. It made an excellent point about variety amongst published sources. Everything from such mundane things as binding or font to even more important points, such as style, organization, format; and this variety of written published sources is only the beginning. Digital publishing and the varieties therein is a whole topic in and of itself. From my perspective, I always saw paper publishing as the backbone of academia, but mainly just that, not the end all and be all of publishing in this day in age. Growing up in what might be called the 'digital consumer generation' I haven't always understood the problems scholars sometimes have with digital technology as another medium of publishing, writing, and creating.

I have grown up, in other words, believing in the benefits of the computer revolution and it's promises to every facet of society. Having been lectured to by certain professors who shall remain nameless since then, I have come to appreciate how difficult it can be to control quality, as well as trying to apply academic standards to what is essentially a free space, chaotic, with no real direction other than what users dictate.

The main purpose in this chapter of getting started, is to understand mainly the challenges of using the digital medium, not just with earlier topics in the introduction of this book (see week one) but also with realizing that digital technology in terms of it's expression capabilities, still has some catching up to do.

In "Becoming Digital" it is stated that an astonishing amount of the 'analog historical record' has already been digitized. I think it should be made clear, that the chapter in my view is referring to how primitive digital tech was just 20 years ago, and how much tremendous progress has been made. Since we live in this time, many of us in the younger generation don't realize just how radically advanced technology is becoming, and the amazing speed of it's development. For example, 30 years ago, a 1GB hard drive was the size of an average slide projector today, and yet now, there are memory sticks no larger than a stick of chewing gum with the same storage capacity if not more, and recently an experimental 1 GB hard drive the size of a quarter was made in Japan!

So compared to what little could be done in terms of digitizing so many dusty records, there has been tremendous progress. But there are hundreds of millions of more records waiting, and the Library of Congress still has piles and piles of records and documents sitting in warehouses from Washington to Lexington. I also feel it is important to keep the recession in mind. Likely, I will have earned my Doctorate by the time the economy, and the federal and state budgets begin to recover fully, so digitizing has most likely been dialed down a notch, and setback in the current funding climate. So although there has been radical amounts of progress made, it's still a long road, before we can accurately claim to live in the "Digital Age".

I found "Digital Humanities" intriguing in that although I was aware of the strange Google books decision, I was not aware of the progress made in open access by the NIH or Harvard, or the attempts to silence such initiatives thanks to publishers with baseless fears, and a front line of politicians to support them. I also come to the same conclusion regarding EndNote, in that they were scared, and in pursuing their legal course, they brought an important question about the freedom to transfer information between mediums, whether from book to computer, or .doc to .txt. In the past I have thought that history teaching, particularly here in the U.S should be more fair, with a more global perspective. So it was a pleasant surprise to find the same argument for humanities, albeit in a digital context. Obviously, one can infer that this could be another benefit of Digitization, and the availability of sources, in that it gives scholars, and the average citizen in particular, the opportunity to see a different perspective, or more information, sort of like the "lost cause mentality" versus the overall "Civil-War" aspect in American history.

I enjoyed IATH, particularly the physical evidence, and even ecological perspective of some of it's projects, the 'Boston Fens' project in particular. The VCDH on the other hand, seemed to be more focused on projects, and providing sources for researchers, and that's nice too. I think these 'exploratives' that were assigned this week are a good example of what various scholars are coming up with nowadays, and their ability to be creative in their presentation of information.

For the CHNM site, the about page was basically the credentials page, 'here' is our goal with this project, 'this' is who we are, followed by the scholarly recognition the site project has received, as well as other associated scholarly sources. Overall a very good presentation of their goals and credentials. Then there was the "Teaching+Learning" section, which provided many topics and sources for a variety of historical subjects for scholars, instructors, and even students to use. I loved the research section, with neatly layed out links to helpful tools and services as well as sources of research material available online. Finally, most impressive about the site in my view was it's excellent and easy to use archive sources, such as the "September 11 Digital Archive" and for me personally, I loved the "Bracero History Archive" which I have still not fully explored.

The CHNM seems to have the goal of "democratizing" history, in other words, having diverse sources available for all to use and reach as many audiences as possible. I feel this is an excellent goal, and one that it has done a fantastic job in working at, simply the existence of such archives as the "Bracero History Archive" show me they are very diverse, and can appeal to many people from all walks of life.