Category Archives: Guides

Guides, Tools

How to Read Crowdsourced Knowledge

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Using Wikipedia:
Wikipedia offers its users a unique opportunity to explore the talk and history pages of its articles. The exploration of the talk and view history pages gives users transparency on the creation of Wikipedia articles. Users can ultimately gain insight on the dialogue contributors have on article creation as well as the revising and editing process of Wikipedia pages.

This is the current Wikipedia page for the Digital Humanities. Under the article heading, users can access the “talk” feature to see what dialogue occured with contributors overtime. In the far right, users can access the articles “view history” to see what changes the article had overtime.
The “talk” feature allows users to see the discussions Wikipedia contributors had overtime in relation to the Digital Humanities article.

I utilized Wikipedia’s talk and history features in my exploration of Wikipedia’s digital humanities’ article. The talk feature allowed me to see the discussions contributors had over the content that was written. There were apparent issues related to the article’s organization. The article also had numerous contributors who engaged in a dialogue on making improvements to the article’s quotations, external links, neutrality, definitions and so on. Users are also allowed to view the biographies of the contributors. For instance, Skirden and Hectorlopez17 were top contributors for the current digital humanities article. They were both associated with Wikipedia projects like Wikipedian in Residence and the Electronic Textual Cultures laboratory. If the information is public, users can see the identified credentials of the key contributors and their associations. In regard to the history, I could see that the article was first created on January 30, 2006 by contributor Elijahmeeks. Since 2006, the page has evolved to include more information related to the digital humanities such as its definition, history, cultural relevance, project purpose, values and methods, criticism, references and external links.

In the view history, users can see when an article was made. In this case, Wikipedia’s digital humanities article was made on January 30, 2006 by contributor Elijahmeeks.

That said, Wikipedia is not entirely perfect. It is open source which means anyone can access its entries. But, its transparency with features like their talk and history pages enables users to see how ideas related to their articles have changed overtime; therefore, enabling a reliance on user judgment.

Using AI:
Just like Wikipedia, Artificial Intelligence programs are not without their own problems and possibilities. Programs like ChatGPT have weaknesses in citing the location of information they utilize in their response. ChatGPT also generates fictional data points when it does not have enough information to answer an unfamiliar question. ChatGPT also has the potential to oversimplify complex issues due to a lack of human input as it is an AI. However, these flaws can be improved with the implementation of human feedback and plug-in creation.

I used ChatGPT to define the digital humanities. It gave me an extensive answer but did not provide citations for the given response.

According to Jon Gertner, AI companies have made moves to correct AI misinformation by using reinforcement learning with human feedback while the Wikimedia Foundation has created a Wikipedia based plug-in to redirect ChatGPT to Wikipedia for further information on a subject matter. For the most part, AI has the potential to work with users to answer questions in a conversational format that can initiate deeper inquiries into various subject matters. Also, the proposed improvements for AI can lead users into carrying their own scholarly research once AI can provide the necessary citations.

Guides

A Guide to Digitization

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Digitization can only go so far in capturing all that an artifact has to offer so it is important to consider the “digitization, rendering and meaning behind a re-presentation” of an image (Conway). To a certain extent, digitization can capture the color, size, shape, sound and texture of an item. Digitization is mostly dependent on the type of digitization that is used to archive an item. Videography works well in capturing the sound of an item, size, color, and texture to offer a more dynamic visual experience. In comparison, photography works well for capturing a “simplistic” image of an artifact. However, photographs can be dynamic in their scope as there are many decisions relating to spatial resolution, tone reproduction and color space. More than one photo of an item may be needed to capture more of what an artifact has to offer. Thus, multiple photographs or a collection can capture more characteristics related to the size, shape and color of an image. As stated by Paul Conway, “building collections of photographs through digitization is fundamentally a process of representation” which is then without a doubt a “far more interesting and complex than merely copying them to another medium.”  However, more than one form of digitization may be needed to capture all the characteristics an artifact has to offer. Meaning is a very important aspect of digitization and one form of digitization may place limitations on the intentions behind a visual image. According to Melissa Terras, digitization is quite “commonplace in most memory institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums” which means digitization will only grow more and more popular as time goes on. Consequently, multiple approaches to digitization are needed in order to enable artifacts to serve educational and artistic purposes that preserve the digitized cultural heritage.