With the ever increasing tide of technology, archives of all kinds are starting to be digitally stored.  And with ease of access and near unlimited space, why not?  The pros of digital archiving are very apparent, which causes the cons to be overshadowed, leading many to think there are none.  Yet the problems are just as real as the benefits, and great care has to be taken when turning physical records into their digital counterparts.

Looking at The Roy Rosenzweig Center For History And New Media, I found a number of articles about the importance of digital history, and the dangers that it could produce.  One article, written by Daniel Cohen (my awesome History 390 professor), states the concerns he has with digital archiving.  With more recourses being available online, a kind of rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer aspect comes into play, with those with sufficient technologies benefitting greatly, but other who lack them falling further behind.  Also, new technologies are constantly being improved and replaced, and it’s unknown how long it will be before our current technologies are outdated.  VHS, hard disks, and cassettes have come and gone in the space of 30 years or so, and all the information on then if lost forever or at the most very hard to get ahold of.  Could that happen other 30 years from now, and all the archives, databases and information we have online be completely inaccessible?

Digital archives do have their positives though.  For one, a majority of the world can access them over the Internet; such as a Northern Virginian teenager going deep into the streets of Ancient Rome, or viewing priceless artifacts only on display in a London museum.  I’m talking from experience here.  Digital archives can be vastly large, and hold more information and records than any physical database could ever hope to contain.  And there’s the social affect of having everything online.  Much more interacts can be made with all types of people, giving new insights, allowing other to learn more, and maybe sparking a flame in someone to pursue history in a more in depth way.

For the good that a digital database can entail, more should be done to combat the negatives.  keeping an eye on new technologies to ensure archives don’t become obsolete is crucial, and making an effort in provide more people with up-to-date access to them will make the social aspect of the digital archive thrive.

The Google Ngram is an astonishing piece of work.  By searching Google Books, which has over 20 million books in it’s library so far, the Ngram finds any word you want to look for and shows how frequent its use has been over a varying timespan.  Given as a percentage, you can see what number of the total words written in a certain era is your word.  My time with Ngram was used to see the evolution of the use of curse words.  There will be some colorful language in this post, but I’ve always been interesting in how the use of them has changed over time.  For these words, I’ll be looking solely in the English corpus of Ngram, from 1600 to 2008.

The first bad word I looked into was ‘damn.’  I noticed this trend in pretty much every word I search, and that is that during the 1800s there is a drop in usage for curse words.  Maybe this was because of the refined era, between, the more loose social bearings on the 17th and 18th centuries, and the freedom of the 20th century.  As you can see, use of damn was relatively high in the 1600s, and reached its highest point in 2007, and has probably continued upward over the past 5 years.

Here you can see the use of ‘hell’ in written works.  Unlike most of the words I looked up, hell peaks very early, and never really comes back into usage, or at least with the prominence it once had.  Of course, this is probably because of the religious text from the earlier centuries; talking about actual Hell and not as an expletive.  That is one of the complaints I have about Ngram, that words with multiple meanings and connotations can’t be looked up separately, meaning you don’t know which usage of the word is being used.  Although I can guess with fair certainty that many of those 17th century uses of hell are religious-based.

‘Ass,’ like hell suffers from the problem of not knowing which meaning is being used in these writings.  Just knowing how language evolves, I can guess that the earlier uses of ass are speaking of the animal, while later uses, such as how it rapidly increases beginning in the 21st century, are talking about the butt or calling other people asses.  Again, there is a decrease in use during the 19th century, probably due to high society, but not nearly as much as some of the other words.

‘Shit’ is probably the funniest graph I was able to find.  Virtually no use from 1780 to 1940, and then a huge spike, and is probably still increasing.  There are also small instances of it being used as far back as 1640, but these fizzle out quickly.  It’s strange to thing of any of these words as modern, but shit fits that definition quite well.

Contrasting shit in it’s timely usage, ‘fuck’ was huge in the 17th and 18th centuries, but never got back to its height of usage after.  Fuck also exemplifies how the 1800s and early 1900s were a no-go area for curse words, with extremely low instances of it being used in those times.  As a Shakespearian word, it’s not hard to image it being used with such prominence during and shortly after his life, but the fact that it never came back into large usage, even in the 21st century, is a little surprising to me.

Comparatively, hell has by far the most usage out of all these curse words, outnumbering all the others combined when at it’s height in the 17th century.  Other’s like shit are just starting to appear and make it into our literature.  While we would consider own time to be one of foul language and swearing, its weird to see that at least as far bak as the 1600s people used many curse words far more frequently than we do today.  Of course, this is just there appearance in writing, but literature more often than not is a good indication of the time, and I’m happy to say that we’re not the most dirty-mouthed generation, something I wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me before today.

First off, I’ve taken a long time to post this because, as I’ve said in my previous post, I’ve never used any kind of PowerPoint/presentation software in my life.  I’ve always had Keynote on my Mac, but this is the first time I’ve even opened the application.  To that end, it took me forever to find out how to get the slides on here.  In fact, I still don’t know how to, and have resorted to taking screenshots of them and pasting them up here.  I have no idea how (or if) you can post the actual slides or the presentation on a blog, as I’ve tried to do so about 100 times.  Anyway, here is my presentation.

My slideshow is on the Battle Of Cannae.  I really feel that one of the things that make PowerPoint so maligned is that it’s boring, repetitive, and most people just read found them like a textbook when presenting.  That’s why for my slideshow, I made there as little text as possible.  If I was doing a presentation with this slideshow, I’d speak from notes or what I’d have memorized about the battle, instead of putting everything on the slides.  For my first slide, I have the title of my presentation, with some subtext, and a picture of Hannibal.  Very basic and easy to understand; I’m only trying to get the subject out there.  I don’t want to bog my audience down with words and having to read paragraphs.  Short and simple.

For my second slide, I have a simple picture of the Roman’s and Carthaginian’s battle movements and formations.  In particular, it shows the beginnings of the Roman’s defeat, as Hannibal starts his frontline retreat.  This caused the Romans to push forward up the center, leaving there flanks open from Hannibal’s African troops to close them in.  It also shows the defeat of the Roman cavalry, which ends up adding more insult to injury in the next stage of the battle.

In the final slide, the Roman’s defeat is show in full effect, with Hannibal’s maneuver completed.  What is now known as the pincer maneuver, this is earliest instance of it ever being used, and had devastating consequences for the Romans.  As the Roman center pushed forward faster than its flanks, the Carthaginians surrounded them in a crescent, while Hannibal stopped his center’s retreat, effectively capturing the Romans in a deadly semicircle.  In most ancient battles, the cavalry would simple sweep through the enemy once, and then go and raid there camp, which was usually empty during the battle.  The Carthaginian cavalry though, instead of ransacking the Roman camp, came back around, charging the Romans from behind, and attacking there weak point for massive damage.  The Roman’s, helpless and trapped inside a wall of Carthaginians, suffering major loses, with over half their force being killed, and that’s when looking at the smallest recorded casualty listings.

I don’t know if this kinda of meta-analysis of my slideshow is what I should be doing, but I think it works.  Looking at my slides, I used them more for things I couldn’t do, such as draw a map of the battle (I mean, I could, but it would be very time-consuming), instead of boring people to death with words and bullet points.

I’ve never liked PowerPoint.  To be honest, I’ve never even used it.  I’ve never been in a situation that needed a slideshow presentation, which I’m thankful for because I despise them.  I find them boring, lazy, unimpressive, and unimaginative.  Of course, there are always exceptions to this, as some slides I’ve seen from my professors have been well done, but the vast majority aren’t.  Edward Tufte expresses these concerns in his article on the evils of PowerPoint, saying that the presence of PowerPoint and slideshows in schools is for the worst.

I of course agree with him; slideshows and PowerPoint shouldn’t belong anywhere, especially in educational environments.  For teachers and students alike, these presentations are a half-assed cop-out for actual lectures and assignments.  The line between bad PowerPoint and worse PowerPoint is thin, with having too much and too little information per slide very hard to overcome.  During some of my classes, the professor will literally recite the slides verbatim, making me wonder why I’m even attending class and not just reading the slide files off BlackBoard.  Other times, the slides will be so filled with words and dots and images that I don’t know what to focus on, which makes taking notes difficult.  And then there’s the student presentations that rely wholly on slides.  I’m proud to say that I’ve never used PowerPoint for any of my class assignments, not wishing to put my fellow students through what they’ve put me through; sitting bored out of my mine as someone stands at the front of the class reading off his computer screen a long-winded slide that I can already see off a projector and have read through numerous times before they finish and repeat for another 20 slides.

There are cases that PowerPoint can be used to good affect.  I don’t think I could have gotten through my Psych 300 class (Statistics In Psychology) without the professor’s equation slides, that were simple and much faster than her writing three line stat equations on the board.  Also, graphs and charts are a lot easier to put onto a slide than hand drawing them, so in an astronomy or geology class I can see how a PowerPoint presentation could be useful and effective.  Still, I dislike PowerPoint with a passion, and feel that many people have fallen into a habit of using it out of ease and simplicity, where other more traditional methods of presenting and teaching would be must more welcomed and effective.

For my chart, I used casualty figures recorded from the Battle Of Cannae.  The battle took place in the year 216 BC, between the Romans and the Carthaginians, during the Second Punic War.  The battle is famous for being the first recorded usage of the pincer maneuver, and also as a crushing defeat for the Roman Army.  Hannibal led his battle-hardened force against a Roman Army nearly twice the size of his own; 50000 Carthaginians and allies versus 86400 Romans and allies.  Meeting at the town of Cannae, Italy, they faced off in what looked to be a Roman victory from the start.

The two sides’ battle lines met, each holding their ground.  The Romans were tightly packed, and their center strong.  Letting that strength become their downfall, Hannibal had his center retreat, causing the Romans to push past his flanks.  This led right into Hannibal’s plan, as now his army formed a crescent around the Romans.  His center stopped their retreat, making the Romans stall, who were now so tightly crowded that many couldn’t draw their swords or swing their spears.  The Carthaginians quickly took the upper hand, slaughtering the Romans as they tightened the semicircle around them.  Hannibal had also wisely used his cavalry, virtually annihilating the Roman horsemen on the other side of the battlefield.

The Romans were crushed, with Hannibal’s forces having strategically bested them.  The massacre took all day, the Carthaginians stopping only when night came.  So many Romans were killed that many died from suffocation under the corpses of their fellow soldiers.  Even looking at the lowest recorded death counts, the Carthaginians had to have killed over 600 Romans a minute, a staggering number.  With Hannibal’s forces only suffering a recorded 8000 casualties, a rout would be more suitable than a victory for the Carthaginians.

Looking at these records, it’s interesting to see the difference each historian had on the battle. Polybius, who would be the first to record the battle, has an incredible death toll, with nearly 70000 Romans having died. The next two, Livy and Eutropius, had more moderate casualties, with the number of dead and escaped being about even. Modern historians tend to agree with Livy’s statistics over others, although Polybius has the most in depth account and information on the battle.