Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler
[Summary of the third session], [02.10.2024]
This session was structured differently than the last one. In the beginning we were told the program of the session and that there would be an election for the student representative for the MAHEC. After this, Madame Papastamkou gave us an explanation of the following group work that had to be done in class. We had to form groups and chose a topic to work on for around 30 minutes to be able to present it to the class afterward. My group chose the third assignment surrounding the archiving of the website “Luxembourg.lu”. I found this very interesting because we could actively familiarize ourselves with a new topic. I have never worked with an internet archive and the Wayback machine was also a new tool for me. During our group work, we could see the evolution of this page over the years, and we could recognize some important changes. In comparison from the first capture to the most recent one, we could see that it looked way more modern, and the colours of the national flag are omnipresent. You also have the possibilities to change the language and the whole site is filled with information for tourists. In addition, the viewer of the website can also enlarge his 1 FOETELER Claire MAHEC Introduction to Digital History knowledge about the Luxembourgish history but also get to know our traditions and culture. With the Wayback machine my group could analyse different statistics and could see various diagrams based on data. Overall, I liked this session, because we could work on something hands on and understand the importance and the frequency of data and metadata. I will include the Internet archive in my research for different projects, because I think it is something very special and I think it is important to see how things evolve over the years. Words: 297 — title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:
- foeteler-id date: 2024-09-25 —
Summary of the second session, [25.09.2024]
During this session, held by Madame Sofia Papastamkou, we mainly learned about the topic of data and metadata. The teacher showed us the differences between those two terms and how we can find data and use it for our advantage. We were also shown different examples to visualize and better understand this complex topic with a photo on Flickr and even a Tweet. An interesting question that the teacher asked was if we, the students, had used data for our work. Another thing that we learned about was the New York public library and their web archives. I thought this was very interesting and nice to know for the future. For me personally, this session was hard to understand and hard to follow because I’m not very into that specific topic of data and metadata. There was a lot of new information to understand and digest, which I found difficult to do. In addition, I found it rather sad that the introduction to Tropy was very short and just done in the last few minutes of the lesson. This should become a tool to use in the future because it seems to have a lot of perks that can favour our research for the Master thesis, for example. I thought the session should have been structured differently. I am a learning-by-doing kind of student, so I would prefer that we would go through the practical stuff together in class and get some at home reading on the more theoretical parts of the course.
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