Week 8–Allyson Woodard

The websites for this week reminded me of Digital Media‘s core assertion that digital culture isn’t dependent on technology alone, but is rather a manifestation of social patterns. Something I found curious while exploring Week 8’s material (particularly the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and La Buena Vida) was that although these sites make far less of an effort to guide viewers through their media than some others we’ve encountered, I was immediately comfortable with their structure–and found them easier to navigate–than other meticulously-curated sites like Highrise. I don’t think this is because they are by nature more intuitive; I think it’s because I have grown up learning how to use databases like libraries and archives.

Which also makes me consider: just as Gere asserts in Digital Media, the participatory nature of the Internet isn’t a brand new phenomenon. Historians, for example, participate with archives by researching primary sources and then re-framing them within scholarly writing, and this academic process is so engrained into my conception of knowledge that I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in training to learn how to do it. A large part of such training is an acclimation to the database, be it a card catalogue or search engine. I think this is why the structure of sites like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank puts me at ease: it’s familiar. Which in this case suits its purpose well, since the goal seems less to compel us to absorb curated information as it is to record and preserve stories from a specific event. We already know the database works well for this purpose, so why radically alter its structure?

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2 comments to Week 8–Allyson Woodard

  • Grace

    That familiar database feel we have with HDMB and La Buena Vida in turn invites us to consider their infinite possibilities for interpretation, for journalistic work, scholarly writing and even fictional/semi-fictional derivatives. You can say it’s like the nerdy equivalent of feeling like a kid inside a candy store. I respond to the essentially unfinished nature of a database like HDMB. Although we may know the big facts about the events, there are an infinite number of ways of structuring the reality around them.

  • jarrattt@uoregon.edu

    It’s interesting reading your post now (which is helping shed light on how these sites can be used!) after reading Joel’s. In his (and I may get this right) he was saying that we don’t need more databases but we need more strategically designed ways of presenting info so that the interpretation is already there, whereas yours highlights the importance of leaving information free of some kind of strategic design so that scholars still have access to the info they may need to shape their own arguments/papers/projects. What do you think of Joel’s assertion that these databases without strategy are just making more noise? I personally think I like having both types of projects, those that have the more familiar database where you can set parameters and find the info specific to the inquiry and those that have already gone on and designed the raw material into a message. Maybe that is an easy answer. I want to have it both ways. But like Grace mentions, the database offers multiple interpretations of the info, whereas with Highrise we are locked in to the interpretation and can only offer critiques of how they used the info.

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