Here's an interesting digitization dilemma, that we'll be looking at a bit more closely..
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/24/thurgood.marshall.court/index.html?hpt=C2
How do you claim exclusive rights to government created materials?
Make transcripts perhaps?
Take a look!
Q
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Newspaper OCR correction, fun in Finland!
Here's an interesting link, to using games to correct OCR..
http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en/splash
Q
http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en/splash
Q
Copyright links
Thanks to Carlos Ovalle for speaking with us today, and you HAVE to watch this video, it's a great discussion of copyright.
Carlos' presentation can be found at
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~cjovalle/presentations/digitization/
and his copyright module is located at
https://cyberspace.ischool.utexas.edu/course/copyright/intro.php
Feel free to reference this video in your discussion board posting,
Thanks!
Q
Sunday, January 30, 2011
My history of digitization
First, for the purposes of this class, and this assignment, here is a definition of "digitization".
Digitization is the process of taking things that are accessible in the physical world, like writings on paper, pictures on film, sounds on a radio, video from a television, and making them accessible in the digital world created by the World Wide Web, and by extension, to a plethora of mobile devices.
Ok, not a perfect definition, but should be good for this assignment.
My history of (actually with) digitization began with Gopher in 1991. My girlfriend at the time was a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UT, which is now the School of Information, and I was a undergrad at UT majoring in Government. She kept showing me stuff on Gopher, which was a precursor to the World Wide Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
Being able to see digitized government documents without having to go to a physical place like the library was tremendously useful to me, and the use of Gopher, WAIS, Archie, and Veronica was growing quickly, especially in 1992. I was also dependent upon a laptop computer to survive at UT, having been diagnosed with motor dysgraphia as an adult, 13 years after leaving UT unable to handle the handwriting load required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
Digitized documents were incredibly beneficial to me, being dependent upon the computer for survival, but things really got interesting in 1993 with Mosaic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29
Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, and it made Gopher look like a funny animal that lives in a hole in the ground. It appeared on the UT campus just before Spring Break in 1993, and the Computation Center used to have a graph that charted Gopher usage on the wall in the bunker just east of the Tower. A massive spike appeared in Mosaic use after Spring Break, and Gopher was doomed to obscurity, and the Web never slowed down.
Why? Pictures. To go from a text-only interface with Gopher to a graphical interface that included actual photographs and images was simply night vs. day. I don't remember the first image I saw on the Web, but I do remember thinking "this changes everything".
Then sound. Even with modem connections of the day, I could hear audio from the Supreme Court oral proceedings, courtesy of "streaming media" and the Oyez Project at Northwestern University.
http://www.oyez.org/about/
It took cable modem technology to bring video to the digitization universe, and things continue to change at a rapid pace. But there is still a huge backlog of cultural heritage materials left to be digitized, to take advantage of the access that digital technologies can provide. And that's why I'm teaching this class.
Tell us about your "history with digitization". What piqued your interest in this topic, enough to make you take a class to learn more about it? What do you hope to do with what you learn here?
Please make sure you send Jessica your blog address, so she can add it to the list, and we can ultimately grade it.
Thanks!
Q
Digitization is the process of taking things that are accessible in the physical world, like writings on paper, pictures on film, sounds on a radio, video from a television, and making them accessible in the digital world created by the World Wide Web, and by extension, to a plethora of mobile devices.
Ok, not a perfect definition, but should be good for this assignment.
My history of (actually with) digitization began with Gopher in 1991. My girlfriend at the time was a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UT, which is now the School of Information, and I was a undergrad at UT majoring in Government. She kept showing me stuff on Gopher, which was a precursor to the World Wide Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
Being able to see digitized government documents without having to go to a physical place like the library was tremendously useful to me, and the use of Gopher, WAIS, Archie, and Veronica was growing quickly, especially in 1992. I was also dependent upon a laptop computer to survive at UT, having been diagnosed with motor dysgraphia as an adult, 13 years after leaving UT unable to handle the handwriting load required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
Digitized documents were incredibly beneficial to me, being dependent upon the computer for survival, but things really got interesting in 1993 with Mosaic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29
Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, and it made Gopher look like a funny animal that lives in a hole in the ground. It appeared on the UT campus just before Spring Break in 1993, and the Computation Center used to have a graph that charted Gopher usage on the wall in the bunker just east of the Tower. A massive spike appeared in Mosaic use after Spring Break, and Gopher was doomed to obscurity, and the Web never slowed down.
Why? Pictures. To go from a text-only interface with Gopher to a graphical interface that included actual photographs and images was simply night vs. day. I don't remember the first image I saw on the Web, but I do remember thinking "this changes everything".
Then sound. Even with modem connections of the day, I could hear audio from the Supreme Court oral proceedings, courtesy of "streaming media" and the Oyez Project at Northwestern University.
http://www.oyez.org/about/
It took cable modem technology to bring video to the digitization universe, and things continue to change at a rapid pace. But there is still a huge backlog of cultural heritage materials left to be digitized, to take advantage of the access that digital technologies can provide. And that's why I'm teaching this class.
Tell us about your "history with digitization". What piqued your interest in this topic, enough to make you take a class to learn more about it? What do you hope to do with what you learn here?
Please make sure you send Jessica your blog address, so she can add it to the list, and we can ultimately grade it.
Thanks!
Q
Semester Blogging Assignment- How, Why, When, and What (The Who is YOU)
OK folks, time to get to work. In addition to getting the materials ready to scan for this class, and teaching the class, I'm also the technical supervisor for 3 Capstone projects this semester, all of which had to get rolling these last weeks. So I'm behind a bit, but done whining, and time to get started.
Except now it's a sunny, 70 degree Sunday in January... time to sit outside and blog I guess.. I hope you do yours Tuesday evening, when the forecast is for 23 degrees..
I use Blogger.com to track my work time and things I do for my regular job at the iSchool, so I'm comfortable with the tool. What I don't use Blogger for is blogging, yet.
Jessica is the driving force behind this, and she has lots of good reasons, all of which I support. The big one for me is not being trapped in BlackBoard, it will take a lot of work to blog for this class, and you should get some lasting benefit from this effort, and this class. Your blog for this class should be a series of posts about the digitization universe, and the areas you are interested in. You must also think of it as just another thing you can add to your resume in search of a job.
Take a look at what Jessica is doing with hers. It shows a broad and growing interest in lots of things, and could, for better or for worse, give an employer a bit more insight into what your interests, and abilities, really are. It's a good thing, and like many things in the "social network" of the Web these days, can also be a bad thing. You get to chose, but for the purposes of this class, you learn to play the game so you can make an educated decision.
Jessica covers the "How" to blog in the Course Documents section of BlackBoard, I just covered the "Why" we are blogging, now the "What" and "When".
"What" to blog? What are you interested in? That will be one thing to blog, where digitization is concerned. I may also ask you to blog on a certain topic, which I will request, and will serve as a minimum for grading.
"When" to blog? When you want to, and when I ask you to. Like, now.
Here is your first "official" blogging assigment! Please title it "My history of digitization".
In my next post, I'll demonstrate what I'm looking for.
Thanks! Q
Except now it's a sunny, 70 degree Sunday in January... time to sit outside and blog I guess.. I hope you do yours Tuesday evening, when the forecast is for 23 degrees..
I use Blogger.com to track my work time and things I do for my regular job at the iSchool, so I'm comfortable with the tool. What I don't use Blogger for is blogging, yet.
Jessica is the driving force behind this, and she has lots of good reasons, all of which I support. The big one for me is not being trapped in BlackBoard, it will take a lot of work to blog for this class, and you should get some lasting benefit from this effort, and this class. Your blog for this class should be a series of posts about the digitization universe, and the areas you are interested in. You must also think of it as just another thing you can add to your resume in search of a job.
Take a look at what Jessica is doing with hers. It shows a broad and growing interest in lots of things, and could, for better or for worse, give an employer a bit more insight into what your interests, and abilities, really are. It's a good thing, and like many things in the "social network" of the Web these days, can also be a bad thing. You get to chose, but for the purposes of this class, you learn to play the game so you can make an educated decision.
Jessica covers the "How" to blog in the Course Documents section of BlackBoard, I just covered the "Why" we are blogging, now the "What" and "When".
"What" to blog? What are you interested in? That will be one thing to blog, where digitization is concerned. I may also ask you to blog on a certain topic, which I will request, and will serve as a minimum for grading.
"When" to blog? When you want to, and when I ask you to. Like, now.
Here is your first "official" blogging assigment! Please title it "My history of digitization".
In my next post, I'll demonstrate what I'm looking for.
Thanks! Q
SOD second class
Whew! 1470 pages scanned, and the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry archives are back safe and sound to the Briscoe Center for American History. Even the "extra" materials were scanned by our intrepid students, and many began the OCR process as well.
Andrea Cato, who is doing a Capstone Project on this effort, Jessica Meyerson, our TA, and myself spent Mon-Wed transporting, selecting, organizing, and distributing materials to scan to each of the students, in 3 categories this semester: transcripts, abstracts, and newspaper clippings. All of it was scanned, now the OCR process begins, as well as the checking to make sure all is in order. Plus we've had a student add the class, so some load balancing will be necessary...
A great start, but plenty of room for improvement. The tutorial needs refining/replacement, which will occur before next semester, and hopefully will coincide with a version change in the software over the summer. It needs to be shorter, and the directions on saving the project files and different formats, and why we do things this way, as well as compressing the project files, needs to be clearer and more concise.
I'm open to suggestions from students about the tutorials, from the questions I received in class I'm aware of the above problems, and certain there are more. My preference would be to come up with an anonymous survey instrument for each tutorial, they are really an ongoing usability test of sorts, and I"m well aware of their limitations, but also know their strengths. I just need to come up with a good way to get timely, anonymous, feedback, which would be ideal.
In the meantime, if you can trust me to not hold anything against you, I certainly trust that you can provide open, honest, and constructive criticisms and suggestions about the tutorials. We will be working with all manner of complex, changing, software this semester, and I will continue to rely upon tutorials to get students up to speed on various applications we need to digitize these collections.
SOD third class will be all OCR, all the time. I expect problems with the newspaper stuff, it's the experiment of the semester in text digitization.
Thanks! Q
Andrea Cato, who is doing a Capstone Project on this effort, Jessica Meyerson, our TA, and myself spent Mon-Wed transporting, selecting, organizing, and distributing materials to scan to each of the students, in 3 categories this semester: transcripts, abstracts, and newspaper clippings. All of it was scanned, now the OCR process begins, as well as the checking to make sure all is in order. Plus we've had a student add the class, so some load balancing will be necessary...
A great start, but plenty of room for improvement. The tutorial needs refining/replacement, which will occur before next semester, and hopefully will coincide with a version change in the software over the summer. It needs to be shorter, and the directions on saving the project files and different formats, and why we do things this way, as well as compressing the project files, needs to be clearer and more concise.
I'm open to suggestions from students about the tutorials, from the questions I received in class I'm aware of the above problems, and certain there are more. My preference would be to come up with an anonymous survey instrument for each tutorial, they are really an ongoing usability test of sorts, and I"m well aware of their limitations, but also know their strengths. I just need to come up with a good way to get timely, anonymous, feedback, which would be ideal.
In the meantime, if you can trust me to not hold anything against you, I certainly trust that you can provide open, honest, and constructive criticisms and suggestions about the tutorials. We will be working with all manner of complex, changing, software this semester, and I will continue to rely upon tutorials to get students up to speed on various applications we need to digitize these collections.
SOD third class will be all OCR, all the time. I expect problems with the newspaper stuff, it's the experiment of the semester in text digitization.
Thanks! Q
Thursday, January 20, 2011
SOD First Class
Bear with me folks, this blogging stuff is new to me as well, I've used it for years to track my tech support activities, but not in a class.
Things went fairly smoothly today, not a lot of questions, and the computer images and scanners seem to be behaving.
One thing I noticed is folks switching back and forth a lot in some cases with the tutorial, you CAN run the tutorials and ABBYY on the same platform, and you can also switch back and forth using the scroll lock, scroll lock, enter sequence.
Today is the 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration, there is some fantastic color 16mm footage on this diary page at
http://whd.jfklibrary.org/Diary
Ugh, I forgot to remind folks they will need an iSchool account to access the NAS next week, sent them an email.
Going to need spare scanners and computer down here, just in case...
Q
Things went fairly smoothly today, not a lot of questions, and the computer images and scanners seem to be behaving.
One thing I noticed is folks switching back and forth a lot in some cases with the tutorial, you CAN run the tutorials and ABBYY on the same platform, and you can also switch back and forth using the scroll lock, scroll lock, enter sequence.
Today is the 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration, there is some fantastic color 16mm footage on this diary page at
http://whd.jfklibrary.org/Diary
Ugh, I forgot to remind folks they will need an iSchool account to access the NAS next week, sent them an email.
Going to need spare scanners and computer down here, just in case...
Q
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