The first thing  I would like to point out is that the maze wouldn’t show up when I went to it today. I did get a chance to check out Scratch. Scratch seemed interesting from the video but I was already intimidated by what the possibilities could turn into. I am by no means a tech savvy person so designing or creating something simple seemed to me a dificult task. To help push me away from the idea I am not an artsy person either. What could I possibly want or be able to accomplish by creating a little dancing cat.

I did go through and download Scratch and it was what I anticipated. I would like to think I am not completely unable to understand basic logic but I wasn’t able to do anything past spin the cat in a circle and make it walk a few steps in a square and face different directions. The meowing sound did manage to excite my dogs which is a positive to take from the program. I may go back and try to understand more of the commands but sleep is calling.

The Rosenzweig article discussed topics about digital preservation. It covered things from the physical side of digital documents and the human element that interferes with the preservation of digital history.

From the physical side we see problems in the rapidly changing formats that documents are saved in. The article claimed that most of the formats that we save information to is no longer valid in ten years. This leaves us with the problem of how to retrieve information once a document is no longer accessible because of formatting problems. A couple solutions to this is to keep a copy of the hardware that is able to read it but that can go bad as well plus you need someone who knows how to repair it if it’s broken. A second way to fix this issue is to emulate the programs. I think this is a good idea personally, it works for video games and those are much more complicated than a textual document. A second issue with physical preservation is the corruption or broken files. Digital data is destroyed more easily than physical copies. This is even more problematic with digital files because in many cases if one bit is corrupted then the whole file is unreadable unlike physical documents where if a word is missing the rest of the document is still available for viewing.

A couple issues for digital preservation on the human side of things are who is responsible for preserving the data and what is worth being preserved. Starting with who should preserve digital documents we want to look at who owns the documents. Now that we have learned that so many things are still licensed online. We find that there is no way for archivists to save data because it can be called copyright infringement. We see this when they talk about libraries. Physical items can be bought by a library and sit in the library and be preserved. Digital texts can not be bought by libraries so the documents sit unguarded on the web. The second topic I want to bring up is what is worth being preserved. It doesn’t make a lot of sense economically for many owners of websites to keep updating and preserving their corner of the internet. A well funded website will continue to run but a site run by Joe Smith with an interest in a random topic will more than likely not survive for long. I don’t know what exactly is worth preserving and I don’t think historians and archivists have a great idea either.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=radio%2Ctelevision%2C+computer&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

The link above is a chart of the use of the words television, radio and computer. I couldn’t figure out how to embed it into this post but the link should work. The relevance of this chart is to show how technology has changed over time. Before television and the computer we can see that the radio was well referenced in books. Once the televions comes out it takes about fifty years for it to catch up to the radio in references. It seems to me that this might be because TV’s were expensive and not everyone could afford them. Computers had a much quicker rise to popularity. It is also the most popular topic out of the three technologies with almost double the number of references in the year 2000. I’m curious to know why compouters were referenced more in 1985 than in 2000 though. Does it have something to do with it moving into the public sphere so the availability of the technology was being hyped up by computer companies?

After reading PowerPoint is Evil and reviewing the Abraham Lincoln powerpoint I feel the point of those two readings was to show us how not to make a PowerPoint. The Lincoln slides were awful! It’s a very familiar set of slides that I’ve seen a million times and tend to make me stop paying attention to the speaker. I’m sure I’ve even made slides eerily similar to “Lincoln’s”. The biggest problem I saw with the slides was the fact that there was nothing relevant on the presentation. I would have gotten more just by listening to the speaker. In fact, the presentation would have been more of a distraction to me if it were actually presented. It could have even been worse and forced me to ignore the presentation altogether.

View Places I Go in a larger map

Here is the map we had to make for October 16th I swore I uploaded it back on that date.

This was a chart I found on many eyes that I stumbled across. It was one of the bubble charts that is supposed to show us proportions of jobs compared to each other of unregistered workers in the United States in 2012. There are a lot of negatives to this chart.

The first thing is the lack of any color coding. There are two dots that are colored even though the legend is color coded. Maybe they weren’t done with the chart when they posted it to manyeyes. I am not a fan of the lack of labeling on all of the dots as well. I understand that it may be difficult to put text into the dots but if they were color coded according to the chart it may alleviate the confusion that I got from it. Those are probably my biggest gripes for this particular chart and I hope that they fix them before using this chart in any way.

Here is the chart I created about Roger Wiggington from Fairfax, Va. I found it difficult to use the google tools and just randomly google searched for a chart creator. Obviously, this person is a farmer of some sort. That’s all I got out of the death certificate from Probing the Past. I’ll figure out how to use Google’s stuff later.