I’ve been concerned about how much of what we see on the internet today will still be accessible to future historians of the 21st century ever since I read an article on the digital dark age for an independent study in college (fittingly, I can’t find it now). The article argued that although it might seem like historians studying the…
DH Reads
DH Read: “Tour Rio De Janeiro’s Oldest Slave Port With This New App”
I was listening to NPR on my way home from work the other day and heard a story about The Museum of Yesterday, an immersive app for exploring the history of Rio de Janeiro’s recently unearthed slave dock, Valongo Wharf. The name of the app is a spin on Rio’s new Museum of Tomorrow, a $55 million dollar tourist draw…
DH Read: “Standard practice: Libraries as structuring machines”
Emily Drabinski’s “Standard practice: Libraries as structuring machines,” originally posted on Parameters, is a piece that connects to some of the same issues I discussed last week with the article “For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest.” Drabinski starts out by arguing that, “Libraries are highly organized spaces, defined and produced by standards that determine everything from where a book sits…
DH Read: “For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest”
Ian Bogost has an article at The Atlantic about Google’s new “Classic Papers” section of Google Scholar, where articles from 2006 are selected on the basis of the number of citations since then. Bogost explains the difference between value and popularity and reveals how Google’s monopoly over information discovery has changed how we think about knowledge and information: PageRank and Classic…
