Digital Libraries, Storage, and More

Computers, along with the Internet and the world wide web, have truly revolutionized the storage and transfer of information. It is important to remember, however, that these changes bring both positives and negatives.

For instance, consider the very design of web pages and they have changed over the years. Early web pages were very simple, containing few images and consisting mostly of text. Today’s websites have animations, photos, videos, sophisticated layouts, etc. Obviously, the multimedia enhanced web of today is more pleasing to the eye and the visual information contained in websites today can certainly be useful, but does it help with the transmission or understanding of information? That is debatable. It could easily be debated that many websites these days bury the truly useful information in their fancy layout, whereas the older sites tended to be simpler to navigate and much more direct in their presentation.

Another topic to consider is how digital libraries and databases are bringing new ways to store and access information. They are not replacing traditional methods, just bringing alternatives. Computer databases can store amounts of information that would be prohibitive in physical form and make it easily accessible to many people over the Internet. The same is true of digital libraries. They can store many books in a form that anybody with an Internet connection can access any time they want.

These solutions are not perfect, however. There is no guarantee they will be around for a great length of time and this seriously affects their potential use as a method of preservation. If the company holding the computers disappears and doesn’t hand the data over to someone else, that information is gone. The end result is users may not be able to rely on Internet-based information methods as much as they would more traditional methods.

Obviously no method of information storage is perfect, and these new technological methods are no exception. It is important to take into account both sides of what they bring to the information landscape.

Week 4- Lascaux and Ephemeral Culture

The cave paintings of Lascaux are a great example of how difficult it is to interpret the symbols of another culture without any context as to what that society was like to give us a starting point. There are certainly things that seem like obvious assumptions about the society by looking at them, such as that hunting was a very large part of their existence and that they probably had a lot of experience dealing with animals such as horses and bison, but even these are questionable and don’t tell us much in depth.

Trying to determine the purpose of the drawings or what they meant to the people who made and viewed them is almost futile. They could be stories or myths transcribed so they could be passed down through generations, they could have been descriptions of events, they could have been part of a ritual, they could have simply been art, or they could have been many other things.

What it demonstrates to me is the ephemeral nature of such cultural icons and symbols. Some of the things we take for granted in today’s society could be in pretty much the same position as these cave drawings in the distant future. Maybe future researchers will be able to piece together clues and figure out what get out of them today, or maybe they will be far off of the mark. The cave paintings are a great example of how important cultural context is for interpreting the symbols that are important to a culture. Just like the hobo symbols we looked at last week or the storytelling discussed in the lecture, their real significance (and the key to understanding how they were made in the first place) is in what the culture they were produced for gets out of them and this is extremely difficult to piece together so far after the fact with so few clues to work with.

Week 3 - Crafty Hobos

Analyzing symbols of the hobos is definitely not as easy as you think it would be at first. The only symbols that I could make much of a guess on at all were those that seemed pretty obvious at first, but what I found is that even those were usually misleading. The best I was able to do was guess the general category of what some of the symbols were discussing, but I wasn’t able to get one actually correct.

For instance, I was able to figure out that the cross-like symbol was referring to something about religion, and the one that looks like a house, was, in fact, talking about a house, but I couldn’t get the specifics right. Others I was completely off in my guesses. For instance, the one that looks like a cat I guessed had something to do with animals in the area, when in reality it was referring to a kind lady.

The only way I could really guess the meaning of the symbols was to compare them to the meaning of symbols I am already familiar with. This is where the discrepancies arose, because not only did the hobo symbols not necessarily represent the same set of symbols I am familiar with, but in some cases they may well have been designed to be contradictory with them to confuse “outsiders”. Hobos would not have wanted the symbols to be overly obvious, as they probably did not want just anyone knowing what they were communicating to each other, especially considering that outsiders reading the messages might not necessarily be happy with the fact that hobos were hanging around the area at all.

The hobo signs are symbols at their most basic level; pictures that represent something to humans that interpret them. They can become data when they are collected together and considered as a group, perhaps by looking at them as a language, for instance. The signs are knowledge once that collection of data has been interpreted by someone, for instance, if someone were to start studying and analyzing the language of the hobos, kind of like we did with a few of the symbols. If this person were then to start comparing other languages to the hobo symbols or to start developing his own theories about their significance and development, then they would become knowledge.