Activity 1
The website for the library of congress was down at first. Image 6 of The Key West citizen (Key West, Fla.), November 23, 1962
The topic is the Vietnam war, the image of the newspaper is provided by the University of Florida, also has a section of what is on Broadway, an investor guide, I clicked Florida, and 1960-1963
The Southern most newspaper in USA, shows a political cartoon of peace and Cuba and Berlin
VICE NEWS but the earliest one that appears is from July 30, 2019, incredibly slow to load the images, once I click on one of the links it just freezes for a bit, but then it does load which is surprising the full article will appear, with metadata like author and time posted and so forth. The limitations is the that images do not load very fast. It appears to preserve the real feeling of the original website very well but the actual read more options and other headings such as “Motherboard” work very well it is impressive how preserved it is, the biggest issue is just the loading time.
Both sources are easy to find, the one is from the Library of Congress and the other is Wayback Machine and it is impressive how fell preserved both are. The preservation on the newspaper appears to be complete in manner as the scanning of the documents appear to be very well done. I do not see any ethical issues due to it being a newspaper unless what appears reported was contested during the time due to privacy issues, the same goes for the VICE source, although I would safely guess that there probably is some reporting in the website that must have been more shock factor due to the nature of those sorts of news pages. Unfortunately, I do not see much being lost if the VICE news of that date is lost, the newspaper has more historical significance.
Activity 2
I converted an excerpt on soup and broths by Matty Matheson from his book Home Style Cookery as I love soup. The font size and clarity appears to be very fairly accurate to the actual printing, and it does assume clean printed text. It recognized all of the print very well and no characters misread, it even allows for word search and it appears to be accurate in nature. I surmise that large newspaper clippings with numerous differing fonts and columns all over the page would be more complicated and the OCR would fail to be fully accurate, especially with the word search. Anything that is a foreign entity like a finger or some form of object that is present during the scanning will complicate the process as it does not know how to translate it into text.
I scanned some hand written notes of mine and the result was fairly abysmal, the word search aspect of it mostly, the rest seemed to be fine but the program later could not tell me word counts and search for specific things. The way it scanned it was also very blurry and smudged giving it a very low quality, but maybe if it was some text with much clearer calligraphy it would not struggle as much.
These activities showed me how relatively fragile these sources can be, the library of congress website can just stop working or the scans of the newspapers could be very low quality, the same goes with the born digital source as either the host archive website could not be working or the actual source is very slow and not loading properly. Ethically the issue is privacy and literary rights to the work, and also the ability to propagate misinformation forever as a source, showing the complicated challenges that come with digital historical materials, issues that have always prevailed in some forms as discussed in class.