Digital History!
I am almost sad that today I am not talking about When the United States spoke French: I had a couple of witty quotes that attacked both Americans and French (Italians and French are supposed to be in a "family feud") . It is obviously an opportunity too juicy to miss:
“America is as good an asylum as any other” said the French Talleyrand who said also “The United States are a country where, if there are thirty-two religions, there is only one dish, and it is a bad one.”
I disagree almost completely with him but… hey, two birds with a stone.
Two birds with a stone is perfect to talk about digital history too. To be fair it should be three stones for a bird, because I beat the poor fowl with academia, 3D graphics, it appears even with programming.
I am very excited for Tuesday class: I saw Deb Boyer’s portfolio with great interest and I am eager to learn more about the different instruments to apply in our research field.
In the numerous pages for Tuesday’s class three were the ones that caught my attention more: the tales of an indiscriminate tool adopter, the core “competencies in processes and methods” part of “A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities” and the Intro to 3D modelling.
I worked as a 3D graphic artist; art, art history, history are part not only of my CV, but also of my thinking process and 3D modelling crossed all these disciplines. It is a very powerful toy that is good not only for recreating cool images and for appealing videos, but also for learning and understanding the subject that you are recreating. HERE you can find my portfolio. Modelling require a good amount of training, moreover if you want to achieve a professional level; I don’t think that it is possible or advisable to train historian in 3D graphics, but I think that it would be more than useful if historians, moreover the public ones, had a basic knowledge of what it is possible to do with the instruments, the costs and timing, what it is easy to do and what requires too much ( I had once a client that thought that to add the grass and the trees and the horizon to an image would have been a matter of minutes). For examples that don’t even need a knowledge of 3D modeling but of the 2D basics, maps and reconstructions would improve so much historical books to be simple and immediate to understand and sometimes even for famous books you can find only maps coming out from some decrepit photocopier of the 1980s.
I loved this page and I think that every department should implement something with the double intent of informing the students on the instruments available and their limits and giving a basic training or tips for an efficient use of them. I am obviously not talking about word-processing software, but even if some software are too much, why don’t list them and show their potential? In addition there are some programs that are so useful that some tips would be advisable, Evernote for example.
Someway related to last argument, this chapter of the short guide touches database knowledge, metadata, gis platform (maps) and scripting language. Here we are with programming. Another staple of the modern life that should be part of the general education. We play with computers all day long, we use programs, we surf the web (and often we drown in the internet); however even with a PHD, how many of us know the basics of programming? I know that for History can be sort of a big jump, but we debate all the time regarding the need of leaving the ivory tower but we remain well glued to our beloved dusty covers of books when we could do so much on understanding and crunching big data from online sources (google books?). If we consider a basic knowledge of math a staple of the life of the modern man we have to accept that programming is important as well. For example I love to collect books: I revere them and when I came to the U.S. one and a half of my two bags were heavy, precious, marvelous books (and the backpack was my desktop computer dismounted). Books take space though, and the marvels of computer time allows me to have gigabytes of pdfs too, but good luck in organizing them and creating a database, it would take so much time to open them, search for the title, write the title somewhere, rename the file by hand, insert the title in database. Well why not program something to help? C#, my friend, you can handle access databases, create them, populate them, open pdf files and even search online the isbn number and come out with the all the data by yourself! (well if I tell you how to do it…)
Three stones for a bird? Gimme more please, I am near-sighted.
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