Sam Pratico<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Digital Darwin Event was extremely inspiring, especially after being able to put a face and personality to such a momentous project. The project itself was jaw dropping. There are large collections of writings from and about different thinkers, but the ability to access such a scope with the ease of your computer is unprecedented. Additionally, if I were to use this in an academic work, it is extremely helpful to be able to keyword search the documents themselves, and than to be able to search within the document and easily copy and paste quotes to be used in a paper. However, you can also experience some of the more physical elements that contribute to the story behind the work. The documents are scanned so you can see the paper, the wearing, the handwriting and actual drawings from Darwin himself. All of these things bring Darwin to life in ways that a student researching from their computer couldn\u2019t typically experience, hopefully inspiring more excitement around the research. Additionally, the scope itself opens up new areas of study for many, who couldn\u2019t traditionally find so many related documents surrounding a more niche field of study. Hopefully this project has, and continues to make this impact on academics and enthusiasts everywhere, as well as inspiring other similar projects on other fields or writers.<\/p>\n
I thought the founder of the project himself to be extremely personable. He was excited to talk to us and took the time out of his day early in the morning, answered all our questions and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about helping us learn about this project. It was exciting putting a friendly face to such an impressive project. It made digital history projects seem more accessible, fun and exciting. As someone passionate about mtn biking, learning about his hobby as an avid and talented mountain biker definitely made the whole project and field of study seem that much \u201ccooler\u201d.<\/p>\n
I thought the story of the projects beginnings were very exciting, sort of like an academic startup story. It is the type of thing that took lots of fundraising, bootstrapping and grit, just like a small business. Once established it started gaining more and more resources, materials and support, leading to exponential growth through the network effect. It has had to challenge intellectual property and plagiarism issues just like a startup and ended up being able to run itself off of people\u2019s financial support just like a business. I thought this process showed how academia can be just as exciting as the business world, and the mountain biking professor definitely put a cool face to this story.<\/p>\n
Overall I left the meeting feeling inspired going into my own project. I saw the value of digitizing existing archives and making them accessible. I was better able to understand how making something accessible directly leads to more research into a subject and more creative historical projects surrounding the topic. I can\u2019t wait to visit the archives that my project focuses on and hopefully digitize and increase the access to some of these documents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sam Pratico The Digital Darwin Event was extremely inspiring, especially after being able to put a face and personality to such a momentous project. The project itself was jaw dropping. There are large collections of writings from and about different thinkers, but the ability to access such a scope with the ease of your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7436,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[402584],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3431"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7436"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3432,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3431\/revisions\/3432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}