"user" : "NickMc", "max" : "50", "groupName" : "dhcu"annotations 7, replies 1
Who gets to decide whether these records are public or private? Which individuals and communities do Digital Humanists actually respect? In what circumstances would withholding information from the public eye beget further injustice? In which circumstances would the opposite be true? Can we trust ourselves to be impartial arbiters in determining who gets to protect their privacy and who does not, or do we commit ourselves to protecting privacy regardless of who that protection may hurt?
This seems bizarre to me, so apologies if I've misread. How are we supposed to design for such imaginaries? Are these imaginaries even ethical? Is it appropriate to insert stories we want to hear in contexts and eras potentially foreign to us, as if our own values were universal? Wherever we find documentation we can find instances of counterbalance and resistance; we hardly need to make them up. Didn't this article just rightfully criticize the spread of fake news only three paragraphs above? How is this any different?
I suppose I read this particular quote under the 3w branch of 'Worrying'. Does ease make art more or less significant? I've seen conflicting views that: some say that a true artist should be 'in the zone' while producing, free of any sort of resistance whatsoever as they create. On the other hand, quotes like this one imply quite the opposite: that if your work isn't frustrating, difficult, or confusing, it's not worth being called art. Which is these is the general belief in DH?
Unfortunate as it is, when statements like these come out in the news, I think it goes to show how a lot of history books/classes (and therefore, the people writing the books and teaching the classes, and the bosses of those people) really influence the public's knowledge and in effect erase whole events from history.
Perhaps this is one advantage of the digital world: with so many people writing, many voices are heard. Though I suppose this also allows for the spreading of fake news...it seems like this cycle goes on.
Yeah, I think it's a double-edged sword these days. It's easier to find factual information on the internet, but it's also easier to find fake or biased info: antivaxers still exist, after all, despite the fact that just about anyone can do a simple google search for 'Smallpox'.
I'm glad to see the author's being self-aware, here, since this particular paragraph seemed to me a bit of a stretch. Server farms are organized the way they are to maximize efficiency - any resemblance to Nazi concentration camps is because they, too, were intended to be efficient. Does one prioritize respecting the memory of the deceased when that inefficiency may result in some names being forgotten to history entirely, or do you prioritize efficiency to maximize the amount of victims you can remember at the cost of coming off as cold and insensitive?
I guess I spoke too soon.
I wonder if our current technologies are as robust as we believe they are. Are we going to be scrambling to preserve data digitized on hard drives three decades from now? I can forsee us trying to move stuff from physical databases onto the cloud, but time will tell if that comes to pass or not.