Exercise #1 Part 3: Reflection

For this blog post, I reflect on what I learned from comparing digitized and born-digital sources, as well as experimenting with OCR technology. The activities showed me that while digital history makes sources easier to access, technology strongly shapes what we are able to see, what gets missed, and how we understand the past.

For activity 1, I explored the digitized newspaper from the Evening World that was published back in 1912 reporting on the sinking of Titanic. The headlines were dramatic and urgent, which shows how news was written at the time, especially during major disasters when information was still coming in. The Library of Congress selected the issue, scanned it, and made it available through Chronicling America. While looking at the pages, I noticed scanning and OCR errors where some words were smudged or hard to read. I liked being able to zoom in and move between pages easily, but the experience still felt very different from reading a real newspaper. The digital version removes the feel, size, and texture of the original paper. Accessing the source was very easy. I did not need to create an account or pay anything, and I could search by date and location. This showed me how digitization makes historical sources much more accessible than visiting a physical archive. However, preserving still depends on the technology and funding to keep the website up and online. 

For the born-digital source, I explored early versions of Facebook using the Wayback Machine, called AboutFace.com from the late 1990s. Unlike the newspaper, this source was created entirely for the internet and never existed in physical form. The archived pages showed basic text and many images did not load, links were broken, and nothing was working, this made the website feel incomplete and scattered. Accessing this source was free, but harder to use. I had to know the website name and click through different years to find a version that worked. The preservation of it feels very fragile because if the Wayback Machine disappeared, early versions of Facebook and other websites could be gone forever. 

In Activity 2, I tried OCR by scanning a page of a book I have and then a page from my handwritten journal. The OCR worked well with a proper book because the text was clean and printed. So I tried it with my own journal where my handwriting can be very messy and unsurprisingly, it struggled to read my handwriting. Many words were misread or skipped, showing that OCR assumes text will be neat and consistent. This matters for historical research because many historical documents are handwritten, if OCR cannot read them properly then details may be harder to find or study. Basically the errors can hide important words, names, or ideas and shape how historians understand the past.

Overall, the activities taught me that digital history can be really good but it is imperfect. Technology affects access, preservation, and interpretation, and that digital sources are not neutral because humans and technology both shape what gets preserved and how we see it.