Michael's Blog of the Digital Past

Just another onMason site

Michael's Blog of the Digital Past

Archives for November, 2012

Scratch and Practicum

First of all, I think it’s great that they’re creating something like Scratch, a programming language for children. As someone in his early 20’s who avidly uses technology on a daily basis, learning some form of programming for business purposes or personal purposes (read: creating mod’s for games/assisting a friend in the development of a […]

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Practicum: Creating a Preservation Path

One problem with creating a preservation path is that it requires continual renewal of the digital material being preserved. Personally, this would make creating a preservation path an annoyance, particularly with personal documents. Nevertheless, preservation paths seem to be pretty easy to create. Here’s the steps I’d take: Keep and maintain all relevant files regarding […]

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Preserving the Digital Future

While reading Roy Rosenzweig’s article on preservation  he makes a point of saying that historians used to practice preserving the present for the future as much as studying the past and how it shaped the present. He believes historians, along with archivists, should take a more active role in preserving the present. While I believe historians […]

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Practicum: Using Google Ngram: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

For my Google Ngram, I looked at the word horse in relation to the words car and train. The first interesting tidbit has to do with horse itself – why in the early 1700’s was there such an explosion of the word “horse”? Horses have been domesticated for 5000-6000 years, and they’ve been known as […]

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Practicum: Create a slide show

This is just an example of a power point I tried to make. I really don’t like power point and I think I’ll try something like privy next time. After an hour of trying different things, I have 2 slides, the results of which I am not very impressed with.   The 2nd Boer War

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The problem with APIs: Over-generalization

Dr. Cohen’s article on data mining has several excellent points. For example, having a more comprehensive, humanities-only API/data-mining tool would yield more and better results than a sufficient search using Google’s engine. It’s also interesting to note that free resources can provide better quality data, because these resources can be manipulated more easily, unlike Google’s library of […]

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Historical Chart

For my historical chart, I have created a map that lists all of the current nations (except for South Sudan, which Google doesn’t recognize, apparently, and Scotland, which isn’t considered a separate nation from the UK) who’s national bird is an eagle.   Purple indicates a nation with an eagle as it’s national bird; blue indicates a […]

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The Power of Points

According to Edward Tufte powerpoint presentations, and other related software, is a plague ruining the intellectual integrity of modern discourse. He describes it thusly: Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, […]

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