Megan Sayther: Digital Past

While reading chapter two of Digital History I was most interested in the section where the genre and features of a desired website was discussed. You can see that section here. It was intriguing how it led the reader to understand fully what was needed to think about before creating a personal website. The reader was asked to think about certain questions to lead them in the direction they are trying to go. The main things one needs to think about when deciding what they want to put on the internet are;

• What kind of website are you building?
• Is it going to be a reference work, or an introduction to a topic, or something else?
• Is building a website completely necessary?

When developing a website, especially for historical purposes it stated that it is encouraged for “historians to think of themselves more like architects than plumbers”. This meant that the construction of a website should have a specific purpose and the technical issues and decisions are to be dealt with after a clear purpose is decided upon. There are some recommended ways to think about a direction such as looking at sites about a topic your interested in and thinking of ideas through that. This section made a nice outline to how to begin building a good website.

Vannevar Bush gives a clear image of where he imagines technology evolving. However, I had a difficult time following what he was saying at times because I do not know a lot of information about technology. Bush uses a lot of scientific terms to describe everything and I am not familiar with a good portion of them. While challenging at times it was still very interesting to see how so many of Vannevar Bush’s ideas are more less a reality now.

I also think Bush does do a good job of explaining the importance of expanding your thought to beyond being only based on arithmetic. I really like how he states that scientific reasoning is needed to compensate for what strictly numerical thinking lacks. He outlines this idea when he says;

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool—so useful that it still exists.

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