Malia's post
Blog post 2
Data and Digitization are fundamental tools in the digital humanities. Chapter 2 focuses on data.
At the beginning of Chapter 2, the textbook discusses how finding and presenting data raises
questions about what we leave out of studies, documents, or other materials because of the
process by which we find and present it. In my project, I found the data for the website on
Wikipedia. The timeline includes links to Wikipedia articles about each English monarch. I
believe this could be an ethical issue in presenting data because Wikipedia is known as an
unreliable source.
Chapter 3 explains how the protocol and presentation for the web display are known as the
“language” of the project. This language is also known as HTML, and it basically identifies and
creates the basic structure of the design. As I understand it, it is the website's foundation. You
can find it in tags on the website, like HTTP, which is encrypted information in the URL. This
description helped me further understand the intricate digital languages that encode my project
website because it links other digital documents (Wikipedia) within its own web design.
Digitalization is the process of accessing documents and data and turning them into digital
pieces. For example, you can see digitalization in the image provided on the timeline. It looks
like a scan of a historical painting, but to find the true source, you have to go to the Wikipedia
link.
These chapters make me wonder why my chosen project used Wikipedia as its source and what
data it left out. As shown above, each monarch gets a small description and then a link. This
begs the question of whether the consumers of this website find the data reliable. And what data
and digitization are left out because of the use of Wikipedia? I look forward to further exploring
these questions in my project

ReplyDeleteAlready a great start considering the ethical issues and potential data biases here with your project!