Exploring Historical Newspapers on ProQuest:

As I performed my search on a variety of different items on ProQuest, I found my experience to be fairly simple and straight forward.  Experimenting with searches such as  “The Holocaust”, I found a wide range of information.. maybe a bit TOO wide.  Realizing that “The Holocaust” was much too broad of a topic, I decided to narrow it down using a Boolean operator to something like “the Holocaust AND children”.  Simply doing that landed me with 13,648 fewer results.

I also attempted messing around with the advanced search, trying to further narrow my search on the same topic.  Unfortunately, my amateur ability to perform searches on ProQuest provided me with no luck.

I specifically like the fact that I can perform a search through all of the historical newspapers at once, but also have the option of searching within each newspaper individually.  On the contrary, I dislike the fact that I personally am unable to find a way to narrow my search to the point where I have only a couple hundred results at the most.  Hopefully it’s something I’ll master by the end of this course, that is, if it’s even in the agenda.

Thoughts on Chapter 3 of Digital History: Becoming Digital:

So there are obvious advantages and disadvantages to digitizing the past.

One thing in the reading that struck my eye as an advantage was the fact that it is now possible to digitize old documents that have otherwise become illegible on the original.  As mentioned by Cohen and Rosenzweig in Chapter 3 of Digital History, through the digitization of the L’Enfant plan, people are now able to read Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten editorial annotations.

A drawback to digitizing in my eyes is in fact the amount of things available to the public.  The more history we put on the web, the more it will become the norm.  Even today, I can hardly think of anything that isn’t available online.  It is crazy to think that maybe one day every piece of history made might be at the fingertips of people worldwide.  I personally don’t believe in a world where the masses have access to items far beyond their reach.  Everything has it’s own place and some things should be left confidential.