#becomingdigital

In today’s blog post we are looking at another reading from the Digital History Guide: Becoming Digital. See link : http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/digitizing/4.php This article tells us about the pros and cons of digitization, the different ways that text can be digitized, the benefits and cost of marking up text, to mark up, or not to mark-up text etc. Just to name a few.

 Let’s talk about the cost and benefits of digitizing the past. This chapter coincides with a previous reading entitled “Going Digital.” In going digital it makes comparison of telling time in digital and analog format as it does here as well. Basically stating that on analog clock one is able to read the minutes and second of the time whereas on a digital clock you are only able to read the time as the clock outputs it. So it says digitization leaves out some information which has meaning in analog forms.

 From my understanding this entire article tells us that digitization before cost more because it took longer to gather and transmit more complete information and more to store, but in this digital era that is no longer the case because the cost of digital storage has dropped and the speed of computer networks have increased stunningly. Moving a document from analog to digital is as easy as scanning the original onto one’s computer and there’s not much effort in doing so.