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