Blog Post 2: Data and Digitization

    After reading the two chapters assigned, my definition of digital humanities has changed again. On each page I read in the textbook I feel that I am only scratching the surface of what digital humanities is and what it entails. Yet at the same time everything I read I get the feeling that it is too much, in the way that I do not know how to describe digital humanities in only a few sentences. I keep thinking about different aspects of digital humanities and want to add more to the definition. Yet focusing alone on the two chapters, my definition of digital humanities has changed into a more statistical approach.

    The specific example that stood out to me the most was the differentiation between structured and unstructured data. Each set of data had its different values. Such as the unstructured data I felt gave more personality. While the structured data gave more facts and clear data. The specific model of the data can provide a deeper understanding of what the creditor is trying to emphasize. The use of data modeling when taking information and digitizing it into a more structurally sound item has been used every day. The best examples I can think of are any history websites such as the common website Britannica which takes information from countless historians and places it into a simpler more direct explanation. Digitization has also changed my opinion on Digital Humanities. I have never understood the differences between a TIF image and a RAW image. I have always assumed that there were small differences and it would not affect the image. While in reality it largely affects the image's substance. 

    Data modeling was heavily used for my project on the timeline of the Kings and Queens from Great Britain and England. All the data found on the website was taken from a different website called Wikipedia. The timeline took out the year, image, and a brief summary for each monarch to formulate a precise timeline. The timeline modeled this data by year. As for the digitization regarding my project of the timeline website when I looked further I noticed that all of the images used in the timeline are JPEGs and are from Wikipedia. The images also range from photos of the monarchs to pictures of a statue of the monarch. The most common photos are scanned images of paintings that were done of the monarch. There are also a few examples of images of the monarchs that appear to have come from pages in books, an example would be the image of the monarch Cnut in 1031.