Trove is an Australian website to help people access documents, files, images from the depths of the web.
They make available archives of newspapers and images. But the best part is, you can interact with them. So the users of the website are adding to the old information. For example, people are able to help in the translation from scanned text to digital text of old newspapers - which means the content can then be searched and easily found. So editors and contributors do so usually because they are interested in and have a personal connection with the information they have accessed. For example, you might find your great-grandparents' wedding notice or an article documenting an event your family were involved in - so you add your comments to it and help with the translation. You are adding to the old information in a format that will be there for generations to come.
What a brilliant idea! I love the way a global audience can access these old documents and collectively pull information from them. But hopefully these texts in their real life forms are still as cherished as ever. Hopefully websites like these don't refract people for wanting to look after these documents. How is the content displayed chosen? Also how is the legitimacy of what people translate or add to on these documents checked?
ReplyDeleteSome good questions!!! What does everyone else think?
ReplyDeleteI think that the fact that the original documents have been preserved digitally shows that they are being respected and cherished but more importantly I think there is a huge shift in the way that every-day people are able to access these artifacts. In the past very few people would have had access to them and certainly not just everyday people - rather it would have been a small number academics and museum curators. So, I think that we are probably in for a bit of a shift in the way that we do value these texts - as more and more people access them and actively engage with them the 'novelty' of seeing something old will wear off - but I would hope that the artifacts will become more meaningful - as in something useful will actually be done with them and they will be used for a wide-variety of purposes - rather than just being viewed as static texts or images.
So, I would think our use of these artifacts will change - that doesn't mean that they are any-less cherished or valued though - I don't think...
I don't know about the legitimacy of the translations. At the end of the day, the original is still there. In other similar 'crowd-sourced' type models such as wikipedia, there is evidence to suggest that the number of 'good' editors so much outweighs the number of 'bad' editors that the community is always self-checking and self-correcting.