Exercise #1 Part 1: Digitized vs Born-Digital Sources

Digitized vs Born-Digital Sources

I explored two different kinds of digital historical sources: a digitized newspaper from Chronicling America and also a born-digital website that was preserved through the Internet's WayBack Machine. Even though both can be accessed online, they differ greatly in how they were created and preserved and how we get access to them today.

Digitized Source: The Evening World (April 15, 1912)

The Evening World: Titanic is Reported Sinking (New York, April 15 1912)

The digitalized source I looked at was an issue of The Evening World, a New York newspaper published on April 15, 1912, reposting on the sinking of the Titanic. The newspaper reflects early 20th century journalism, especially with its use of dramatic headlines and big urgent language. Since the Titanic disaster was still unfolding, much of the information was incomplete or uncertain.

Today, the way this newspaper is accessible to readers is shaped by modern institutions and technology, The Library of Congress selected the issue, scanned it, and organized it on the Chronicling America website. Some words are hard to read, it looks like ink or an error when scanning.  The website allows you to zoom in and out to properly read the newspaper, and I liked being able to zoom and move freely between pages, but I can feel how different it is from reading a physical newspaper back in the early 1900s.

The access to the source is controlled by the Library of Congress, but it is surprisingly easy to use. I did not need to make an account or pay to view the newspaper, I just had to search by date and location. It is very low effort compared to visiting an in person archive, it is very accessible and convenient.

Digitization made me think about preservation because if Chronicling America was no longer available, the digital scans could be gone forever even if physical copies can still exist. It really goes to show how much digitization depends on funding of a website, and the technology to stay online. 

There isn't much of a privacy concern with this newspaper but I did notice some ethical issues concerning representation. The way it exaggerates the tragedy and little to no representation of the experiences of the lower-class passengers, immigrants, and women. This goes to show that even if a source was digitized, they can still show biases of the time they were created.

Born-Digital Source: AboutFace.com (1998)

AboutFace.com

For this, I explored the archive version of AboutFace.com, an early website from late 1990s, also known as Facebook in modern times. I got access to this site using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which saves snapshots of websites over a huge amount of time. Unlike the digitized newspaper, this source was created entirely for the internet and had never existed as a physical object.

The original website was created by web developers and designers in the late 1990s, when the internet was just starting out and was still in its experimental stage. The site just had a bunch of texts with almost little to no pictures and designs. Compared to modern day Facebook, it is a massive difference especially because the Wayback Machine could only capture some parts of the site so it's not fully functional.

I noticed that some things are preserved and others are missing. The basic layout and text are still visible, which gives a sense of what the website was trying to do. However, many images do not load, and most links lead to error pages. There is no way to interact with the site, log in, or use features that may have existed at the time. Because of this, the archived version feels incomplete and very different from how the site would have originally functioned. If by chance the Internet Archive disappeared, early versions of these sites could be forever lost. Unlike the newspaper, there are no physical copies of these websites, which shows how quickly digital history can disappear.

Access is controlled by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization so the archive is free and open to the public, but in all honesty, it was pretty hard to use. I had to know what to look for already, including the website name, year, and dates to find a version that loaded properly. Unlike Chronicling America, which was very organized, the Wayback Machine felt like clutter. 

Ethical issues also stood out while exploring this source. Social media and early web platforms are closely tied to personal information and user content. People using early websites likely did not expect parts of those sites to be saved and viewed decades later. This makes born-digital archives more complicated than older historical sources.

So...

Comparing digitized and born-digital sources showed me that digital history is shaped by how materials are created and preserved. The digitized newspaper is easy to access and backed by a physical copy, but it still includes scanning errors and reflects the biases of its time. Born-digital sources are more fragile and depend entirely on web archives to survive, often missing key features and raising privacy concerns. Overall, this comparison made me realize that what we see online is never complete and should always be viewed critically.