Digitization is one of the earliest and most prevalent features of the Digital Humanities, representing both the technological divide between past and present methods of scholarship as well as one of the bridges between them. Melissa Terras provides a concise definition of digitization from the reading: it is “the conversion of an analogue signal or code into a digital signal or code,” which she further elaborates as “the bedrock of both Digital Library holdings and Digital Humanities research” (Terras 1). When one digitizes something, an electronic copy of it is made for preservation, convenient use, public dissemination, or any other reason, but that copy is limited by the medium used. For instance, photography is a widespread method of digitization whereby photos are taken of a subject and then scanned and uploaded into digital media, which may last longer than the captured subject depending on physical degradation versus digital maintenance. However, although a mere still image can easily capture a subject’s physical appearance, it is limited by the perspective of the camera, and cannot easily convey all of the subject’s qualities. Using an example from the module activity, my photograph of a tea kettle provided a clear view of what it looked like in relation to the rest of the kitchen counter, but the still image could not convey an understanding of the water it then contained nor the sound that the kettle would make when put to intended use. Thence, viewers of the digitized image would only have one side of its physical appearance to base its understanding of. Video provides another method of digitization that allows for greater flexibility of perspective, including sound, at the cost of being somewhat more burdensome than photography. Nevertheless, these methods of digitization only create a limited record of the subject, not an exact copy, meaning that digitization is not a replacement of original information, but a supplement. Purely text-based subjects are able to be better captured in digital format, such as the module example of the grocery list, because the information of the text is the subject more so than the paper it is on (so long as the text is digitized accurately), but three-dimensional subjects come with the above issues when digitizing.
Thus, digitization is much more than merely turning a physical source into an electronic one – it involves numerous advantages and disadvantages based on the sources and mediums chosen and the information intended to be recorded or conveyed. A digital scan of an antique photograph is limited by the physical source’s condition when it is scanned, meaning that viewers of the digital scan are unable to potentially restore details of the original. In effect, great care must be taken in choosing what and how to digitize depending on what information or understanding is meant to be conveyed, so that the subject is digitized successfully. As Paul Conway states in the reading regarding photography as digitization, much of the discussion on the process revolves around “the representational value of photography itself and how these values are or are not transmitted to digital surrogates” (Conway 3). In conclusion, digitization is a process that must be carefully measured and approached depending on the subject and relevant information; future viewers of digitized media will depend on the accuracy of past digitization methods so that proper understanding of subjects are preserved, not incomplete ones.
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