Week 9: Building on the Blog

The International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON)
http://www.crl.edu/programs/icon

For my final paper, I am looking to expand on one of my earlier blogposts on newspaper digitization projects. The post discussed the choice some projects make to present individual articles outside of the context of the page they originally appeared in. Since I have worked on several newspaper digitization projects over the years, the topic is particularly interesting to me - not once during those projects did I consider how the final project would be influenced by the way that the digitization was done. This course has made me realize that those choices can have an ever bigger impact than I imagined.

When I first started looking into this topic, I found a huge difference in ongoing and completed projects due to the choices they made regarding several key aspects. Particularly: the equipment and image formats chosen, the software chosen for display (including both proprietary and open source options, with a myriad of differing functionality), the various choices made for zoning and segmentation (and the further choice to do this manually or by an automated process), and the decision to go with an automatic vs. manual assignment of metadata to the eventual scans. Overlying all of this are are plethora of vendor choices, issues of cost, and issues of access. It's a messy world out there. 

For my paper, then, I'd like to explore some of these various decisions, and their implications for the final digitized paper (and its context). This is not something that has really been explored in detail, despite all of the information that is out there. With so many newspaper digitization projects going ahead, I think that such an exploration is long overdue.

Sources:

Previous blog post: "Week 3: What Context?" Futurama of the Book. http://futurama-of-the-book.blogspot.ca/2016/01/week-3-what-context.html