I am a backer of this project, and you can be too. As of the original writing of this post, they are currently 47% funded twenty-eight days out from their deadline. For those of you not familiar with Kickstarter, people can post creative projects and provide rewards for their funders. The funding only goes through if they reach their goal within the time limit – otherwise nothing happens, a model they call ‘all-or-nothing funding’.

What will the money be spent on?

• 45% for PHP programmers who have been coding the custom web interface
• 35% for interface designers
• 10% for data acquisition & data clean up
• 10% for hosting bills

They aim for a five month time-line to move from their existing functional prototype to something viable to release to the public.

I am also intrigued by ways that the work on this project might be leveraged in the future to support similar text-mining projects that tie in location and date. How about doing the same thing with civil war letters? How about mining the lyrics from Broadway musical songs?

If this all sounds interesting, take a look at the video below and read more on the Hip-Hop Word Count Kickstarter home page. If half the people who follow my RSS feed pitch in $10, this project would be funded. Take a look and consider pitching in. If this project doesn’t speak to you – take a look around Kickstarter for something else you might want to support.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Creative Funding for Text-Mining and Visualization Project

Even with the recent announcement that the Flickr Commons is not currently accepting new applications, there are clearly still applications being processed. NARA has been on Flickr since February of 2009 and loaded 49 sets of images. As announced in a recent press release, on the first of February 2010 Flickr flipped the switch and all the images in the The U.S. National Archives’ photostream was shifted over into the Commons.

The 49 sets are sorted into 4 collections:

• Historical Photographs and Documents (19 sets) – including NARA favorites like Rosie the Riveter and Nixon and Elvis and documents from regional archives across the country.
• DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency (27 sets) – one set dedicated to top picks and the rest organized by photographer. Interestingly, NARA’s website has indexed the 15,000+ images from this project by subject and by location. I wonder how the picked which image from DOCUMERICA to port over to Flickr?
• Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (2 sets) – currently 473 out of the 6,066 digitized Mathew Brady images are uploaded into the Commons. The images posted in the Commons are available in a much higher resolution than they are within ARC. A great example from this collection is the image of the Poplar Church (image shown to right) available as a 600 x 483 GIF on ARC and as a 3000 x 2416 JPG on Flickr. This image also has gotten a nice set of comments and tags.
• Development and Public Works (1 set) – the only set in this collection consists of images taken to support the Flathead Irrigation Project. “The Project was initiated to determine rights and distribute water originating on the Flathead Indian Agency in Montana to both tribal and non-tribal land.” These images seem to be the same resolution on both archives.gov and Flickr.

In honor of this transition, NARA posted a new set of 220 Ansel Adams photographs. One of the first comments on the set was “low-res scans? Pretty big letdown.” Fine question. As noted above, other images from NARA in the Commons much larger than the 600 x 522 that seems to be available for the Ansel Adams images. It would be great to have a clear explanation about available resolutions published along with each new set of images.

NARA has published this simple rights statement for all NARA images in the Commons:

All of the U.S. National Archives’ images that are part of The Flickr Commons are marked “no known copyright restrictions.” This means the U.S. National Archives is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the publication, distribution, or re-use of those particular photos. Their use restriction status in our online catalog is “unrestricted.” Therefore, no written permission is required to use them.

NARA has also posted an official Photo Comment and Posting Policy and a fairly extensive FAQ about the images they have post on Flickr. I do wish that there was a simpler way to request reprints of images from the Commons. Most of the NARA images have this standard sentence – but for someone not familiar with NARA and more accustom to one click ordering, the instructions seem very complex:

For information about ordering reproductions of photographs held by the Still Picture Unit, visit: www.archives.gov/research/order/still-pictures.html

I also wish that more of the images had location information assigned – only 113 of the images show up on the fun to explore map view. At first glance it looks as if this information is populated only for images taken near airports. There are many images that include a location based subject in the image description posted on Flickr, yet do not include geographic metadata that would permit the image to be shown on a map. The one image I did find that was not at an airport but did include geographic metadata is this image of the World Trade Center assigned to the NYC Financial District Flickr Location. While I could add a location related tag to NARA’s images, there does not appear any way for the general public to suggest location metadata.

One odd note about this and other World Trade Center images – the auto-generated tags have broken up the building name very oddly as shown in my screen clip on the left.

Another fun way way to explore the NARA Flickr images is to visit the ‘Archives’ page (slightly hilariously titled “U.S. National Archives’ Archives”). Here we can browse photos based on when they were uploaded to Flickr or when they were taken. Those images that include a specific date can be viewed on a calendar (such as these images from 1918) or in a list view (those same images from 1918 as a list), while those taken ‘circa’ a year can be viewed in a list with all other images from sometime that year (such as these images from circa 1824).

Beyond all the additional tags and content collected via comments on these images, I think that being able to find NARA images based on a map, calendar or tag is the real magic of the commons. The increased opportunities for access to these images cannot be overstated.

Take this image of a sunflower. If you visit this image on archives.gov, you can certainly find the image and view it – but good luck finding all the images of flowers as quickly as this Flickr tag page for NARA images of flowers can. Even looking at the special Documerica by Topic page doesn’t get me much closer to finding an image of a flower.

It will be fun to watch what else NARA chooses to upload to the Commons. I vote for more images that are assigned metadata such that they show up on the map and calendar. I will also put your mind at ease by telling you that the lovely ladies at the top of this post are their because their image is one of the most popular uploaded by NARA to date (based on it having been marked a favorite by 88 individuals). The only image I could find with more fans was the classic image of Nixon and Elvis with 250 fans at the time of this posting.

What is your favorite NARA Commons image? Please post a link in the comments and if I get enough I will set up a gallery of Spellbound Fan Favorites!

Image Credits: All images within this blog post are pulled from NARA’s images on the Flickr Commons. Please click on the images to see their specific details.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

National Archives Transitions to Flickr Commons Membership

I chose to experiment by creating a timeline for Spellbound Blog. Dipity made this very easy – I just selected WordPress and provided my blog’s URL. This was supposed to grab my 20 most recent posts – but it seems to have taken 10 instead. I tried to provide a username/password so that Dipity could pull ‘more’ of my posts (they didn’t say how many – maybe all of them?). I couldn’t get it to work as of this writing – but if I figure it out you will see many more than 10 posts.

I particularly like the way they use the images I include in my posts in the various views. I also appreciate that you can read the full posts in-place without leaving the timeline interface. I assume this is because I publish my full articles to my RSS feed. It was also interesting to note that posts that mentioned a specific location put a marker on a map – both within the single post ‘event’ as well as the full map view.

Dipity also supports the streamlined addition of many other sources such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, Tumblr, Pandora, Twitter and any RSS feed. They have also created some neat mashups. TimeTube uses your supplied phrase to query YouTube and generates a timeline based on the video creation dates. Tickr lets you generate an interactive timeline based on a keyword or user search of Flickr.

Why should archivists care? I always perk up anytime a new web service appears that makes it easy to present time and location sensitive information. I wrote a while ago about MIT’s SIMILE project and I like their Timeline software, but in some ways hosted services like Dipity throw the net wider. I particularly appreciate the opportunity for virtual collaboration that Dipity provides. Imagine if every online archives exhibit included a Dipity timeline? Dipity provides embed code for all the timelines. This means that it should be easy to both feature the timeline within an online exhibit and use the timeline as a way to attract a broader audience to your website.

There has been discussion in the past about creating custom GoogleMaps to show off archival records in a new and different way.  During THATCamp there was a lot of enthusiasm for timelines and maps as being two of the most accessible types of visualizations. By anchoring information in time and/or location it gives people a way to approach new information in a predictable way.

Most of my initial thoughts about how archives could use Dipity related to individual collections and exhibits – but what if an archive created one of these timelines and added an entry for every one of their collections. The map could be used if individual collections were from a single location. The timeline could let users see at a glance what time periods were the focus of collections within that archives. A link could be provided in each entry pointing to the online finding aid for each collection or record group

Dipity is still in working out the kinks of some of their services, but if this sounds at all interesting I encourage you to go take a look at a few fun examples:

• The 100 Most Influential Americans: The Atlantic recently asked ten historians to compose their own lists of the 100 most influential Americans.
• Johnny Cash Recorded Appearances: Click on a few of these and you will see the amount of detail that has been added is amazing – video clips, map locations and set lists are included for most of these
• Civil Rights Movement – apparently created by students in “Taft’s thrilling third period American history class at USM”

And finally I have embedded the Internet Memes timeline below to give you a feel of what this looks like. Try clicking on any of the events that include a little film icon at the bottom edge and see how you can view the video right in place:

Image Credit:  I found and ‘borrowed’ the Dipity image above from Dipity’s About page.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Dipity: Easy Hosted Timelines

The book begins with an introduction by the editor, Anne Kelly Knowles. This chapter explains the basics of using GIS to study history, as well as giving an overview of how the book is organized.

The meat of the book are the case studies covering the following topics:

• Salem Witch Trials (Benjamin C. Ray)
• Antebellum North and South (Aaron C. Sheehan-Dean)
• Civil War Battlefield Stories (David W. Lowe)
• Immigration, Ethnicity and Race in NYC 1900-2000 (Andrew A. Beveridge)
• Redlining in Philadelphia (Amy Hillier)
• Causes of the Dust Bowl (Geoff Cunfer)
• Agricultural History (Alastair W. Pearson and Peter Collier)
• British Population (Ian N. Gregory and Humphrey R. Southall)
• Archaeology (Trevor M. Harris)
• Mapping the Ancient World (Tom Elliott and Richard Talbert)
• The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative and the North American Religion Atlas (Lewis R. Lancaster and David J. Bodenhamer)

I suspect that different audiences will take very different ideas away from this book. I was for looking for information about GIS and historical records (this is another book found during my mad hunt for information on the appraisal and preservation of GIS records) and found a bit of related information to add to my research. I think this book will be of interest to those who fall in any of the following categories:

• Archivists curious about how GIS might enhance access to and understanding of the records under their care
• Historians interested in understanding how GIS can be used to approach historical research in new ways
• History buffs who love reading a good story (complete with pictures)
• Map aficionados curious about new and different kinds of information that can be portrayed with GIS

I especially loved the maps and other images. I am a bit particular when it comes to the quality of graphics – but this book comes through with bright colors and clear images. The unusual square book format (measuring 9″x9″) gave those who arranged the layout lots of room to work – and they took full advantage of the space.

No matter if you plan to read the case studies for the history being brought to life or are looking for “how-tos” as you tackle your own GIS-History project – this book deserves some attention.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Book Review: Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History

CIESIN – Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, especially Guide to Managing Geospatial Electronic Records (USA)

CUGIR – Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository, especially Collection Development Policy (USA)

Digital Curation Center – supporting UK institutions who store, manage and preserve these data to help ensure their enhancement and their continuing long-term use, especially Curating Geospatial Data, especially Curating Geospatial Data (UK)

Digital Preservation Coalition – “established in 2001 to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.” Especially their Decision Tree. (UK)

GeoConnections – a Canadian national partnership program to evolve and expand the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). (Canada)

InterPARES 2 Case Studies – especially CyberCartographic Atlas of Antarctica and Preservation of the City of Vancouver GIS Database (VanMap)

Library and Archives of Canada – especially Managing Cartographic, Architectural and Engineering Records in the Government of Canada (Canada)

Library of Congress Digital Preservation – subtitled “The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program” (NDIIPP) (USA)

Maine GeoArchives (USA)

Maryland State Geographic Information Committee Standards for Records Preservation

NGDA – the National Geospatial Digital Archive, especially Collection Development Policy For The National Geospatial Digital Archive and UCSB Maps & Imagery Collection Development Policy (USA)

New York State Archives – especially GIS Development Guides: GIS Use and Maintenance (USA)

North Carolina Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (USA)

North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project – especially their NDIIPP proposal for Collection and Preservation of At Risk Digital Geospatial Data (USA)

OMB Circular No. A-16 – which requires the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) (USA)

Any great sites I am missing? Please let me know and I will add to the list.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

GIS and Geospatial Data Preservation: Research Resources

To start off, I want to consider the topic of defining the electronic record in the context of GIS. One of the things I found most interesting in my research was the fact that defining exactly what a single electronic record consists of is perhaps one of the most challenging steps.

If we start with the SAA’s glossary definition of the term ‘record’ we find the statement that “A record has fixed content, structure, and context.” The notes go on to explain:

Fixity is the quality of content being stable and resisting change. To preserve memory effectively, record content must be consistent over time. Records made on mutable media, such as electronic records, must be managed so that it is possible to demonstrate that the content has not degraded or been altered. A record may be fixed without being static. A computer program may allow a user to analyze and view data many different ways. A database itself may be considered a record if the underlying data is fixed and the same analysis and resulting view remain the same over time.

This idea presents some major challenges when you consider data that does not seem ‘fixed’. In the fast moving and collaborative world of the internet, Geographic Information Systems are changing over time – but the changes themselves are important. We no longer live in a world in which the way you access a GIS is via a CD which has a specific static version of the map data you are considering.

One of the InterPARES 2 case studies I researched for my paper was the Preservation of the City of Vancouver GIS database (aka VanMap). Via a series of emails exchanged with the very helpful Evelyn McLellan (who is working on the case study) I learned that the InterPARES 2 researchers concluded that the entire VanMap system is a single record. This decision was based on the requirement of ‘archival bond’ to be present in order for a record to exist. I have included my two favorite definitions of archival bond from the InterPARES 2 dictionary below:

archival bond
n., The network of relationships that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation (file, series, fonds). [Archives]

n., The originary, necessary and determined web of relationships that each record has at the moment at which it is made or received with the records that belong in the same aggregation. It is an incremental relationship which begins when a record is first connected to another in the course of action (e.g., a letter requesting information is linked by an archival bond to the draft or copy of the record replying to it, and filed with it. The one gives meaning to the other). [Archives]

I especially appreciate the second definition above because it’s example gives me a better sense of what is meant by ‘archival bond’ – though I need to do more reading on this to get a better grasp of it’s importance.

Given the usage of VanMap by public officials and others, you can imagine that the state of the data at any specific time is crucial to determining the information used for making key decisions. Since a map may be created on the fly using multiple GIS layers but never saved or printed – it is only the knowledge that someone looked at the information at a particular time that would permit those down the road to look through the eyes of the decision makers of the past. Members of the VanMap team are now working with the Sustainable Archives & Library Technologies (SALT) lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to use data grid technology to permit capturing the changes to VanMap data over time. My understanding is that a proof of concept has been completed that shows how data from a specific date can be reconstructed.

In contrast with this approach we can consider what is being done to preserve GIS data by the Archivist of Maine in the Maine GeoArchives. In his presentation titled “Managing GIS in the Digital Archives” delivered at the 2006: Joint Annual Meeting of NAGARA, COSA, and SAA on August 3, 2006, Jim Henderson explained their approach of appraising individual layers to determine if they should be accessioned in the archive. If it is determined that the layer should be preserved, then issues of frequency of data capture are addressed. They have chosen a pragmatic approach and are currently putting these practices to the test in the real world in an ambitious attempt to prevent data loss as quickly as is feasible.

My background is as a database designer and developer in the software industry. In my database life, a record is usually a row in a database table – but when designing a database using Entity-Relationship Modeling (and I will admit I am of the “Crow’s Feet” notation school and still get a smile on my face when I see the cover of the CASE*Method: Entity Relationship Modelling book) I have spent a lot of time translating what would have been a single ‘paper record’ into the combination of rows from many tables.

The current system I am working on includes information concerning legal contracts. Each of these exists as a single paper document outside the computers – but in our system we distribute information that is needed to ‘rebuild’ the contract into many different tables. One for contact information – one for standard clauses added to all the contracts of this type – another set of tables for defining financial formulas associated with the contract. If I then put on my archivist hat and I didn’t just choose to keep the paper agreement, I would of course draw my line around all these different records needed to rebuild the full contract. I see that there is a similar definition listed as the second definition on the InterPARES 2 Terminology Dictionary for the term ‘Record‘:

n., In data processing, a grouping of interrelated data elements forming the basic unit of a file. A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (The Society of American Archivists)

Just in this brief survey we can see three very different possible views on where to draw a line around what constitutes a single Geographic Information System electronic record. Is it the entire database, a single GIS layer or some set of data elements which create a logical record? Is it worthwhile trying to contrast the definition of a GIS record with the definition of a record when considering analog paper maps? I think the answer to all of these questions is ‘sometimes’.

What is especially interesting about coming up with standard approaches to archiving GIS data is that I don’t believe there is one answer. Saying ‘GIS data’ is about as precise as saying ‘database record’ or ‘entity’ – it could mean anything. There might be a best answer for collaborative online atlases.. and another best answer for state government managed geographic information library.. and yet another best answer for corporations dependent on GIS data for doing their business.

I suspect that it will be via thorough analysis of the information stored in a GIS system, how it is/was created, how often it changes and how it was used that will determine the right approach for archiving these born digital records. There are many archivists (and IT folks and map librarians and records managers) around the world who have a strong sense of panic over the imminent loss of geospatial data. As a result, people from many fields are trying different approaches to stem the loss. It will be interesting to consider these varying approaches (and their varying levels of success) over the next few years. We can only hope that a few best practices will rise to the top quickly enough that we can ensure access to vital geospatial records in the future.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

The Edges of the GIS Electronic Record

From LifeHacker’s Post: “To view these new old maps, you’ll need the latest version of Google Earth (use the program’s check-for-updates feature if you’re not sure you have it). In the layers section, select All Layers, then look for Featured Content > Rumsey Historical Maps.”

For the biggest bang – try the ‘Lewis and Clark 1814′ layer. I never really understood how large an area they traversed. This is such a great example of giving an archival record context. In this case it isn’t the context of who, when or why the record was created – it gives the user context that connects the record to the rest of the world. For maps this is easy to imagine (especially with Google Earth’s snazzy new Historical Maps), but what if we thought of ways to not only frame archival records within the context of their creation – but ways also to connect them with the current world.

When reading a newspaper article about a current event, the reader often will wonder about things that happened in the past that are related to what they are reading. One of the glories of the web is having terms hotlinked to other pages that give you more information about that term.

As more and more archival records are digitized (or are just born digital in the first place), the archival community will have the opportunity to find better and better ways to encourage the rest of the world to use said records in a quest to better understand current events. I see this as a major way for archives to earn the respect and understanding of the average person.

To some degree there is nothing now to stop a top notch newspaper (pick your favorite with a good online presence) from adding a “Learn more about this issue in history” sort of sidebar that links to a select list of relevant archival records. Many articles do this already to some degree simply by including images related to the story.

Take the recent Washington Post article Quarantined about a woman diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1954. If you click the link to the photo gallery and go to the 4th photo in the set you will see an image from the Library of Congress. While it is attributed (in teeny tiny type) there is no easy way to go and explore other images like this one. Ah – but by doing a search over on the LOC.gov site on the words tuberculosis poster kiss, I find my way back to this same poster shown to the left (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection, [LC-USZC2-5369 ]).

I am trying to imagine what the next leap beyond the sort of usage demonstrated by the Washington Post article would look like. Could we come up with a centralized virtual archive with the ability to do the following?

1. permit registration of specific records – and allow assignment of meta data (such as date, location/GIS info, topic, and perhaps some keywords)
2. build an interface for those who want to fish for related records to feature on their sites
3. ensure that when a link to a record is shown, that the proper credits and links to the home institution are included

I guess what I am imagining is the equivalent of Google Ads for archival records. Sort of funny when I think of it that way. In fact – it makes me wonder if access to such a repository of well organized archival records available for use by online publishers could create some sort of revenue stream for those who carefully populate the metadata for records such that the online publishers can quickly find what they need. Would the keepers of the records provide the images themselves or thumbnails of the images with a link to the primary copy deep in their repository’s website? Talk about an interesting engine for fueling outreach and bringing in new web traffic.

I know that there are a million issues I am not thinking of (or thinking of and carefully ignoring) – but the best wild ideas pay no attention to the fine details when they are in the brainstorming stage. Let’s just leave it with the fact that I really like the idea of increasing exposure of the general public to primary sources. If we can both encourage and make it easier for purveyors of online content to use archival records to enhance their websites (especially with deep links back to the websites of online repositories) I think it can only serve to increase the profile of archives and their repositories.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Google Earth, Historical Maps and Ideas on Context

Our proposal is for a traditional 3 presentation panel with the title “Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World”. All we need now is a 3rd presenter, the endorsement of an SAA section or roundtable and (of course) the approval of the session selection committee. (And some plane tickets!)

This is the current version of our description for the proposal (mostly composed by Abby) :

Now that digitization projects have become more common in archival repositories, user and archivists alike have uncovered problems when it comes to understanding the context of online materials. However, there are various ways to provide more contextual information, thus enhancing the use of digital archives. But, archivists must confront the obstacles surrounding this task by developing best practices and incorporating new software into their digitization projects. In order to simplify the problem, we should return to our traditional archival principles and draw connections to collection arrangement and description in a digital environment. Join three archivists to explore how to improve on “analog” techniques in the communication of context. When done right, the digitization of a collection will not only retain all the same opportunities for communicating context that we are familiar with, it may revolutionize the way that archivists and users interact and understand our records.

The short take on what we want to cover in our session’s presentations is:

• What should archivists be doing to not loose context and original order information in the transition from analog records to digitized records?
• What can digitization give us the ability to do that we couldn’t do in the analog world?
• What tools and standards are out there today to help archivists do both of the above? What information should archivists be capturing to permit them to take advantage of the opportunities to communicate context and original order that these tools and standards offer?

Abby’s part of the session, titled “Where’s the Context? Enhancing Access to Digital Archives”, will examine the need for preserving context and original order when digitizing archival materials – focusing on how it enhances online use and access to archives. How can new systems retain the existing ability to communicate context and original order when moving from “analog” to “digital”?

My portion, “Communicating Context: The Power of Digital Interfaces”, will discuss what archivists can do in the digital world they cannot do (or at least not easily) with analog records to communicate context and original order. I will focus on various innovative methods to do this including the use of GIS, hot-linking for ease of navigation, the ability to ‘collect’ digital surrogates for examination and more. I plan to include a combination of exciting new interfaces doing great things alongside new ideas of what could be done. Keep your fingers crossed for us that there is internet access in the session rooms in Chicago.

We have a vision of a third speaker whose talk would consider what the leading standards and software tools are permitting people to do today. How can archivists leverage the existing and evolving standards (EAD, EAC, TEI and other DTD s) to capture and communicate context and original order in the digital world? In addition, it would provide a high level review of common software packages (Archon , Archivists’ Toolkit, ContentDM , and others) and how they address original order and context. Finally we have a notion of a checklist of what to capture when digitizing to take advantage of what these tools and standards can provide for you.

Are you our mystery 3rd panelist that we are having so much trouble finding? Your first tip is that you have already mapped out 5 powerpoint slides in your head and started scribbling a rough draft of the “Archivists’ Digitization Checklist for Preserving Context” on a scrap of paper near your computer.

Maybe you know someone who would be a great person to pitch this to? Or you have advice for us concerning who to pass our proposal along to in the great hunt for that elusive session endorsement?

The deadline looms large (October 9)! Please contact us either via email (jeanne AT spellboundblog DOT com and adamsabi AT uga DOT edu) or in the comments of this post.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA 2007 Session Proposal: Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World

While deciding if we should model PLACE as an entity, a woman in our class who is a genealogy specialist told us that only one database she has ever worked with tries to do any validation of location – but that it is virtually impossible due to the scale of the problem. Since the borders and names of places on earth have changed so rapidly over time, and often with little remaining documentation, it is hard to correlate place names from archival records with fixed locations on the planet. Anyone who has waded through the fabulous ship records on the Ellis Island website hunting for information about their grandparents or great-grandparents has struggled with trying to understand how the place names on those records relate to the physical world we live in.

So – now to my daydream. Imagine if we could somehow work towards a consolidated GIS database that included place names and boundary information throughout history. Each GIS layer would relate to specific years or eras in time. Imagine if you could connect any set of archival records that contained location data to this GIS database and not only visualize the records via a map – but visualize the records with the ability to change the layers so you could see how the boundaries and place names changed. And view the relationship between records that have different place names on them from different eras – but are actually from the same location.

I poked around to see what people are already doing – and found all of this:

• Digital Earth and it’s more recently updated counterpart Geospatial Applications and Interoperability (GAI), a working group of the Federal Geographic Data Committee that seems to now exist within the National Geospatial Program Office of the USGS.
• GOS – Geospatial One Stop which led me to the fabulous Lewis and Clark GeoSystems
• The National Atlas (also found off GOS) that includes a special History Chapter (that starts to head in the direction I am imagining I think)
• GEOnet Names Server (GNS) that provides access to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names‘ (US BGN) database of foreign geographic feature names (take this and add in a history element, and we are getting even warmer)
• GIS for the Humanities – funded by a 2003 NEH Focus Grant, this project’s goal is “designed to create, and train faculty in the use of, mapping modules intended to enhance humanities courses”. I included this one because it gives a slice of the kind of teaching my dream GIS database could fuel.
• And two clearinghouses for information: the US National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse and the United Nations Environment Programme / Global Resource Information Database (UNEP/GRID) Spatial Data Clearinghouse

I know it is a daydream – but I believe in my heart of hearts that it will exist someday as computing power increases, the price of storing data decreases and more data sources converge. I do forsee another issue related to the challenges presented by different versions of borders and place names from the same time period – but there are ways to address that too. It could happen – believe with me!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

GIS, Access, Archives and Daydreams

Two big ideas were discussed: the first about historians and their relationship to internet archiving and the second about using the internet to create collections around significant events. These are not the same thing.

In his article Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, Roy talks extensively about the dual challenges of loosing information as it disappears from the net before being archived and the future challenge to historians faced with a nearly complete historical record. This assumes we get the internet archiving thing right in the first place. It assumes those in power let the multitude of voices be heard. It assumes corporately sponsored sites providing free services for posting content survive, are archived and do the right thing when it comes to preventing censorship.

The Who Built America CD-ROM, released in 1993 and bundled with Apple computers for K-12 educational use, covered the history of America from 1876 and 1914. It came under fire in the Wall Street Journal for including discussions of homosexuality, birth control and abortion. Fast forward to now when schools use filtering software to prevent ‘inappropriate’ material from being viewed by students – in much the same way as Google China uses to filter search results. He shared with us the contrast of the search results from Google Images for ‘Tiananmen square’ vs the search results from Google Images China for ‘Tiananmen square’. Something so simple makes you appreciate the freedoms we often forget here in the US.

It makes me look again at the DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act) legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives. In the ALA’s analysis of DOPA, they point out all the basics as to why DOPA is a rotten idea. Cool Cat Teacher Blog has a great point by point analysis of What’s Wrong with DOPA. There are many more rants about this all over the net – and I don’t feel the need to add my voice to that throng – but I can’t get it out of my head that DOPA’s being signed into law would be a huge step BACK for freedom of speech and learning and internet innovation in the USA. How crazy is it that at the same time that we are fighting to get enough funding for our archivists, librarians and teachers – we should also have to fight initiatives such as this that would not only make their jobs harder but also siphon away some of those precious resources in order to enforce DOPA?

In the category of good things for historians and educators is the great progress of open source projects of all sorts. When I say Open Source I don’t just mean software – but also the collection and communication of knowledge and experience in many forms. Wikipedia and YouTube are not just fun experiments – but sources of real information. I can only imagine the sorts of insights a researcher might glean from the specific clips of TV shows selected and arranged as music videos by TV show fans (to see what I am talking about, take a look at some of the video’s returned from a search on gilmore girls music video – or the name of your favorite pop TV characters). I would even venture to say that YouTube has found a way to provide a method of responding to TV, perhaps starting down a path away from TV as the ultimate passive one way experience.

Roy talked about ‘Open Sources’ being the ultimate goal – and gave a final plug to fight to increase budgets of institutions that are funding important projects.

Dan’s part of the session addressed that second big idea I listed – using the internet to document major events. He presented an overview of the work of ECHO: Exploring and Collecting History Online. ECHO had been in existence for a year at the time of 9/11 and used 9/11 as a test case for their research to that point. The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is another project launched by ECHO to document stories of Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

He told us the story behind the creation of the 9/11 digital archive – how they decided they had to do something quickly to collect the experiences of people surrounding the events of September 11th, 2001. They weren’t quite sure what they were doing – if they were making the best choices – but they just went for it. They keep everything. There was no ‘appraisal’ phase to creating this ‘digital archive’. He actually made a point a few minutes into his talk to say he would stop using the word archive, and use the term collection instead, in the interest of not having tomatoes thrown at him by his archivist audience.

The lack of appraisal issue brought a question at the end of the session about where that leaves archivists who believe that appraisal is part of the foundation of archival practice? The answer was that we have the space – so why not keep it all? Dan gave an example of a colleague who had written extensively based on research done using World War II rumors they found in the Library of Congress. These easily could have been discarded as not important – but you never know how information you keep can be used later. He told a story about how they noticed that some people are using the 9/11 digital archive as a place to research teen slang because it has such a deep collection of teen narratives submitted to be part of the archive.

This reminded me a story that Prof. Bruce Ambacher told us during his Archival Principals, Practices and Programs course at UMD. During the design phase for the new National Archives building in College Park, MD, the Electronic Records division was approached to find out how much room they needed for future records. Their answer was none. They believed that the speed at which the space required to store digital data was shrinking was faster than the rate of growth of new records coming into the archive. One of the driving forces behind the strong arguments for the need for appraisal in US archives was born out of the sheer bulk of records that could not possibly be kept. While I know that I am oversimplifying the arguments for and against appraisal (Jenkinson vs Schellenberg, etc) – at the same time it is interesting to take a fresh look at this in the light of removing the challenges of storage.

Dan also addressed some interesting questions about the needs of ‘digital scholarship’. They got zip codes from 60% of the submissions for the 9/11 archive – they hope to increase the accuracy and completeness of GIS information in the hurricane archive by using Google Maps new feature to permit pinpointing latitude and longitude based on an address or intersection. He showed us some interesting analysis made possible by pulling slices of data out of the 9/11 archive and placing it as layers on a Google Map. In the world of mashups, one can see this as an interesting and exciting new avenue for research. I will update this post with links to his promised details to come on his website about how to do this sort of analysis with Google Maps. There will soon be a researchers interface of some kind available at the 9/11 archive (I believe in sync with the 5 year annivarsary of September 11).
Near the end of the session a woman took a moment to thank them for taking the initiative to create the 9/11 archive. She pointed out that much of what is in archives across the US today is the result of individuals choosing to save and collect things they believed to be important. The woman who had originally asked about the place of appraisal in a ‘keep everything digital world’ was clapping and nodding and saying ‘she’s right!’ as the full room applauded.

So – keep it all. Snatch it up before it disappears (there were fun stats like the fact that most blogs remain active for 3 months, most email addresses last about 2 years and inactive Yahoo Groups are deleted after 6 months). There is likely a place for ‘curitorial views’ of the information created by those who evaluate the contents of the archive – but why assume that something isn’t important? I would imagine that as computers become faster and programming becomes smarter – if we keep as much as we can now, we can perhaps automate the sorting it out later with expert systems that follow very detailed rules for creating more organized views of the information for researchers.

This panel had so many interesting themes that crossed over into other panels throughout the conference. The Maine Archivist talking about ‘stopping the bleeding’ of digital data loss in his talk about the Maine GeoArchives. The panel on blogging (that I will write more about in a future post). The RLG Roundtable with presentations from people over at InternetArchive and their talks about archiving everything (ALSO deserves it’s own future post).

I feel guilty for not managing to touch on everything they spoke about – it really was one of the best sessions I attended at the conference. I think that having voices from outside the archival profession represented is both a good reality check and great for the cross-polination of ideas. Roy and Dan have recently published a book titled Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web – definitely on my ‘to be read’ list.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Session 510: Digital History and Digital Collections (aka, a fan letter for Roy and Dan)