Pull quote: “The Library of Congress dreams of being able to provide scholars instant results for all kinds of queries—’to be able to answer any question a researcher puts before the archives,’ as Dizard says—but that may be a long way off. Right now, to run a single query can take days.”
Pull quote: “Some people still don’t think digital records match the research value of paper archives, because they don’t carry immediately recognizable personal features—handwriting, for instance. Ms. Nelson finds digital records charismatic too. ‘I would say you can see plenty of the hand of the author in these records, and they can be very compelling,’ she told us. Computer files can tell scholars a lot about how a writer did research, composed, and revised, what Web sites he visited, whom he corresponded with, and more.”
Pull quote: “This is the first time the libraries have tried to preserve materials from a large-scale, continuing event, said Bradley Daigle, director of digital-curation services. The staff did not begin collecting materials on the subject until a rally on June 18. As of June 22, the team has archived nearly 20,000 tweets, 61 blog posts, over 200 media posts, and about 100 physical objects, such as signs from protests.”
Pull quote: “How do we strike the balance between recognizing, paying tribute to, and celebrating the work of those who collect, preserve, exhibit, and organize traces of the past while also making clear that there is so much that could be learned by those who come and explore?”
Pull quote: ‘We make things because that’s how we understand. We make things because that’s how we pass them on, and because everything we have was passed on to us as a made object. We make things in digital humanities because that’s how we interpret and conserve our inheritance. Because that’s how we can make it all anew.”
