Having been using Google Maps for about as long as I’ve been using the Internet, getting into building my own maps was an easy task.  Google’s made its map interface very user-friendly, and their tutorials are a help if you don’t know where to start.  For me, I just started playing around with the tools, and quickly became proficient in creating and editing the shapes, lines, landmarks, etc. that can be added to your custom map.

View My Awesome Map in a larger map

As for the charts, you can definitely tell it’s in a beta form.  I couldn’t actually get the preview on the right side of the page to show my chart, so to have a look at what my chart was like visually, I had to constantly view at as an image in a separate window.  It was very annoying and made the whole process twice as long.  Also, the Radar Chart is impossible to figure out.  After nearly 20 minutes of trying to create one, I gave up and went on to a Pie Chart; which was exponentially easier.  You’d have to be a savant to make even a half-way decent Radar Chart.

Overall, I love working with Google Maps, and found it fun and easy to use.  Google Charts on the other hand go can throw itself off a building.

My time on the Internet has been fairly short by most standards; I’ve only had a personal computer with online access since I was 14.  Starting off on the Internet so late (compared to most of this generation) has had its advantages, such as having a smarter, more grounded head on my shoulders, and thus not falling into the traps so many younger people have, such as having bad passwords, joining every site they come across, or playing so many free online games that their computer has a breakdown.  Even as I got accustomed to the web and dealing with it, I was very security-conscious, going out of my way to ensure what I was doing was safe for me personally and my computer.

Passwords have never been a problem for me.  I’ve never been a member of so many sites that I couldn’t remember which password went to which account, and as the years went on, and sites started needing more and more numbers, letters, caps, and symbols for their passwords, I quickly adopted them into my older passwords, which made it easier for my to remember even new passwords.  Like I said before, I also never had more than maybe 4 sites that I regularly visited with an account.  Even sites that I routinely go to I avoid making an account if possible.  I also never have my credit card saved on a site unless I use it extremely regularly, such as Amazon and my paypal account.  I don’t even have my card saved on my Steam account.  I also only use iTunes gift cards for my music purchasing, my credit card is not on my Apple account; and I get my music from either iTunes or from my personal CDs.  I’ve always had bad thoughts about torrents or pirating anything (games, music, etc.), in part because it’s illegal, and I’m never sure if the sites are safe or not.

When I had my PC, I had all the firewalls and the highest security settings for browsing the web.  I’d never download anything from a site I didn’t trust, and made it so that even stuff I would download needed to be scanned a number of times before it would start the process.  Since I’ve bought my Mac I’ve been a lot more lenient with what I do online.  Not that I’m less careful or visit every site no matter how shady it is, but the fact that Apple products have virtually no chance of getting viruses (not getting hacked though) compared to PCs, I don’t have to worry as much.  I still delete anything that starts immediately downloading when I visit a page, and never take any weird looking online surveys.  I’d say I have a very good, security-conscious way of interacting on the Internet, and with my Mac coupled with my hesitance in dealing with anything unfamiliar online, I have an extremely low chance of get a virus.  Sadly, hackers are still a problem, but I tend to not think about that too much.

Ever since the creation of the Cloud about a year or so ago, I’ve been very weary and skeptical of the thought of switching over to it.  The thought of all software, files, data, etc. being located in a nebulous form of online space was an immediate turn off.  Even when I heard about it for the first time, from a friend who described it pretty vaguely (and expressed the same concerns I have now), I didn’t feel too comfortable with the idea.  Pretty much eliminating the need for a hard drive, the Cloud works by storing all your images, music, games, documents, and anything else that takes up memory on a remote server that’s connected to your computer.  An interesting thing about the Cloud is that you can have multiple links to the same server, meaning your phone, tablet, MP3 player, desktop, and laptop could all share the memory that’s on the Cloud.  Apple capitalized on this and made the iCloud, which allows sharing between every product they make.

Even on paper, the Cloud sounds like a fishy idea; all your information and personal digital data stored on a huge server that you must remotely access to allow sharing between a number of your devices?  Just thinking about it makes me scared for the protection of my documents.  Not to mention the problems with hacking.  As Mat Honan experienced first-hand, the Cloud makes it all too easy for someone to go from your iPhone to your Macbook, or vice-versa.  Also, simply hacking into the Cloud is an option, granting access to thousands of people’s information while only doing the work of one hack.  The existence of the Cloud makes your likelihood of being hacked increase exponentially; instead of having to pinpoint your computer or device out of the millions of computers out there, one can just hack a Cloud server, and yours and everyone else’s data that’s stored there is unprotected and ready for the taking.  It also doesn’t help that as Honan describes, it’s apparently extremely easy to fake Apple’s iCloud management and gain access to people’s data without having to even breach security.  Concerns have also been raised about how the server hosts (such as Apple) having access to all your information too.  With them controlling the data storage, they could be going through anyone’s information, legally or illegally.  They could delete data with on intent or by accident, and you’ll have no way of getting it back.  There’s thousands of possible outcomes and situation that may arise, and most of them are bad for your security and privacy.  Here’s a great article on how to be security-concious when dealing with the Cloud, and highlights that privacy laws are still in the works, which again makes me hesitant on switching over anytime soon.

While intuitive in it’s design, the Cloud is something I can see only causing problems in the future digital age.  I’ve already seen the dangers of it through Mat Honan, which only confirmed my beliefs on how risky switching to Cloud computing is.  In an age where all our information is online (or at least most of it), sending all of it to a web version of a public storage, minus the security is probably one of the worst things you could do compared to keeping your information on your hard drive.  I myself have not used any Cloud-esque storing or sharing, and I don’t plan to.  Honan comments that many computer companies (most notably Apple) are pushing for universal Cloud use of it’s users.  I for one will be the last person to switch over to Cloud computing if that’s the case, and I offer everyone do the same if they value their privacy and online safety.

With so many legal barriers that have been set up in just about every facet of the Internet, it’s not always an easy thing to tell if a website and its activity is within the myriad of laws or breaking them.  With so much information so readily and easily available online, it’s hard to understand sometimes that any (or all) of it is under legal protection, and you must always be aware of how, why, where, and what you’re using.  Although broad and vague, knowing a certain site’s legal standing can mean the difference of you misusing information and having a green light for your actions.  As for the ArchiveTeam, I looked into whether or not they were partaking in legal activity.

The ArchiveTeam is a group of people, similar to Anonymous but without bad intentions, who search the Internet for information and archive it in a database.  Comparable to what the Library of Congress does with physical documents, the ArchiveTeam’s mission is to create a record of all online interactions for future people to look back on.  One thing the Internet does very well is destroy information.  Delete, trash, loose, you name it, and the Internet has done it.  Although information is always being created, it’s the preexisting data that the ArchiveTeam wants, because you never know when a site might crash, be taken down, or hacked, and all the posts, comments, and in a sense history that that site created is gone.  With physical items, you can save and preserve them for thousands of years, and still have them be recognizable and distinguishable; but for digital artifacts, the medium is so young that we have no idea on how massive amounts of data with be preserved.  Who knows what will happen to Facebook, Google, FanFiction.net, or Reddit in a 100 years.  Those sites are a part of this generation and its culture, and if it’s lost, then so much insight and information about our time will be lost too.  Historians looking back 100 years, or even 1000 years to our civilization have to account for the Internet if they are to understand how we lived, and if none of that data is around, then they’ll mostly be in the dark.

The ArchiveTeam’s goal is ambitious, but I believe it’s for the greater good.  However, in our current time, it’s not as clearly commendable as it might be 100 years from now.  Many websites that have massive amount of data (important data at that), have many laws and regulations set up to protect their information from falling into the hands of people just like the ArchiveTeam.  Yes, Facebook records could be extremely useful to have archived somewhere for future generation to look back on and study, but would anyone sign up for their personal information to be taken by a group of random Internet hacks and trolls to be put into their own database?  I don’t think so, and I doubt Facebook as a company would be too thrilled to do it either.  To ensure an unbiased opinion, I used the 4 factors of the Copyright Act to see if the ArchiveTeam was infringing any of the other site’s rights.

First is purpose, which I think they pass with flying colors.  Creating a database of online information to ensure it doesn’t get lost in time and be available for the future to view is pretty much the definition of anthropology.  These’s no commercial use of the data, and it’s not being manipulated in any way either.  Second is nature, which is a little hard to pinpoint with the ArchiveTeam, but I think they pass this one too.  Like I stated before, none of the works, creative or not, are being manipulated or altered, and all the data has to have been published in some form for it to be able to be retrieved by them.  Because they aren’t actually using the data for anything other than being stored, I think their nature is fine.  The amount of works is where I think the ArchiveTeam isn’t on too good of grounds.  With less of the work the better, the ArchiveTeam takes that to the opposite extreme and uses the entirety of the millions of works they’ve stored.  Again, their use of the data is pretty passive, and in order for their mission to be of any value, they’d need the entire work (posts, stories, etc…) to be intact.  Because they aren’t actively manipulating the data, and for their actions to have any meaning whatsoever, I’d let them pass on amount, if only for the fact that without the entire amount being able to be used, they might as well stop archiving data.  The last step, effect, is another strong point for ArchiveTeam’s actions.  The act of storing data has basically no effect of any kind of market or monetary value the sites hold, but will have a distinct effect on the future, for which they’re doing the archiving in the first place.  The effect of them using the information has no foreseeable consequences on the standings of the sites they take the data from.  That gives the ArchiveTeam a 4 out of 4 score in the copyright law, giving them the go ahead to continue.

The ArchiveTeam’s case is unique in that the ways they’re using the data is passive enough for them to pass many of the oversights that might tie up other groups and sites.  Not to say their underhanded in their actions, but their cause is one that has no real negative effects on participating parties, and only helps add to the available data in the future, which many would agree is extremely important to the history of this generation.  Internet data is as fragile of physical objects, and have to be treated, cared for, and stored respectfully.  Our entire current culture is based on the web, and our identity is lost without it.  For the sake of future historians and anthropologists, we shouldn’t let overprotective legal rights allow data to go unstored, and potentially lost forever.

In a time where art can be expressed in so many ways, it’s not hard to see why such a large amount of older works has been used in new ways to represent something completely different than the original.  New audio, videos, and images are created everyday, but also old audio, videos, and images are being reimagined to fit with the ever-changing landscapes of their mediums.  In music especially, there is a wealth of sampling other people’s works, but it’s not a slight on the original, but more a acknowledgement that the work is useful and fits so many roles that it was at first not intended to.  Probably none more so than the amen break.

The band The Winstons in 1969 recorded the song “Amen, Brother” as a b-side to another single of theirs, and in the song features a 6 second drum beat, or break.  Going largely unnoticed for a decade, the drum break suddenly saw a resurgence when sampling was first introduced to the music world.  Done by mainly taking an already-recorded piece of music and then being able to edit and change the music based on what you want, sampling revolutionized how music was made, and opened up thousands of possibilities to the hip-hop and techno scenes that were then just coming into being.  The amen break soon found itself appearing in hundreds of bands, from groups like N.W.A., Oasis, and Nine Inch Nails, to a multitude of underground reggae and electronic DJs, who would splice the original beat up so much that it could barely be recognized.

Now, some might call sampling lazy, or unoriginal, and others might even classify it under theft.  But I see sampling, or any form of it in music or art, as appreciation.  Those artists who used the amen break weren’t out to cheat The Winstons out of money, or to use their beat illegally, but to further their own music.  The fact that entire genres started with sampling the amen break is a testament to what kind of influential power it has.  And it’s not just the amen break, thousands of songs have been sampled and used by other artists.  Off the top of my head, Kanye West, one of the biggest artists in hip-hop, and one of my favorite artists, has used King Crimson samples in his song “Power“, and Daft Punk samples in “Stronger.”  Vanilla Ice, sampled David Bowie and Queen’s song “Under Pressure” for his song “Ice Ice Baby.”  DJ Shadow’s album Endtroducing….. is made up entire of sampled works; hundreds of cut up bits of music put together to make something just as incredible as the original music.

Sampling in itself is fine, but there is a fine line between it and blatant plagiarism.  This line is blurry, and can be easily overstepped by something as simple as using too much of another song as a sample or not crediting it in the liner notes.  Sadly in the present day it’s harder to sample music, due to increased legal problems and ownership laws; which is good for lawyers and music company CEOs, but not for the other musicians who could be making just as good music from sampling as the original artist did.  Containing and limiting the availability of music can only cause constraints to new artists and genre-specific musicians, who rely on samples to make their music.  There’s such a focus on money and what’s your’s isn’t anyone else’s today, that something like Endtroducing….. probably couldn’t even be made in the current time.  That silencing is scary, and I hope that as we move forward that the industry will realize that the stifling of creative expression will only hurt them in the long run.

Ever since I first began using the Internet, Wikipedia has always been one (if not the) main site I’ve looked to for information regarding everything from psychological disorders to TV shows to my favorite albums.  99% of all questions I’ve had on a subject can be easily found at Wikipedia; and if not, its links and references are a great place to find further readings.  Rarely have I given thought to the validity of an article on Wikipedia, usually believing that the editors and writers are accurate and trustworthy enough to hold their pages to a level of fact.  With these previous experiences, I went into a historical Wikipedia article and evaluated how it’s edited and upkept, and if it’s reputable.

Acre, Israel was the page I choose.  An old city that came to prevalence during the Crusades, Acre itself is an enormous historical artifact of the Holy Land and the wars that raged around the area for centuries.  The first thing I did when I got to the page was click the ‘View History‘ button on the top of the page.  There, every single edit that has ever been done to the page is kept on record, dating all the way back to the page’s creation on September 27th, 2001.  Back then, the page only contained 7611 bytes, which equals only about 3000 words.  Jump ahead to the latest edit, and the page has 36380 bytes worth of pictures and text; an incredible increase.  Every edit made also shows if it was kept in the article, or eventually cut out after it was posted.  A large majority of the edits stayed in place, and many having surveys between the writers and editors and other contributors on if the new information is accurate or where it should be moved in the article.  In my time with the article, I found that a lot of care has gone into making the Wikipedia page for Acre a historically accurate and detailed article that contains a wealth of useful and interesting information.

While looking through the article, I came to the ‘Talk‘ tab on the top of the page, and when opening it, found an article ranking and importance system.  I’d never been aware of this feature, and had no previous knowledge of tiers of articles other than the ‘Featured Article‘ list on the front page of Wikipedia.  Acre, Israel for example, has a ranking of a ‘B’ and is of high importance to the Israel portal of WikiProject (the editorial and writing team who oversee Wikipedia and other WikiMedia).  Other pages I looked into were Radiohead’s Album Kid A, and has a ranking of ‘FA’ and a high importance to the Alternative Music portal; and the page for the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is in the process of being raised for ‘C’ to ‘B’ ranking and is of high importance to the Anime portal. Here’s an example of the ranking system among geology articles, with grades ranging from ‘A’ to ‘Stub.’  Rankings are given based on the article’s citations, structure, grammar, accuracy, supporting material, and accessibility.  This is just another way to find out if an article is accurate and worth reading.  I’ve always loved Wikipedia and continue to use it almost religiously.  It might not to the most accurate or in depth source available, but it come pretty darn close.  With Wikipedia’s increased emphasis on accurately written and edited articles, and less of the ‘anyone can add information’ attitude that it was previously known (and somewhat maligned) for, I see it as an ever-growing bed of knowledge that in every way should be taken advantage of.

I remember back in 2008 when Iran launched three (what was perceived to be 4) long range missiles to demonstrate their growing military power.  Soon after, I was watching The Daily Show and found out that only 3 missiles had been launched, and that by using Photoshop editing, the Iranians had essentially pasted another missile into the picture.  Of course I was somewhat familiar with this phenomenon, with people posting misleading images and videos on Youtube, Reddit, and a host of other hotbeds for memes; but for a world power such as Iran to partake in it (and do a poor job nonetheless; it was found out nearly overnight that the image was fake) was pretty shocking.

Upon reading Morris’ article on the history of editing photos, I became aware that the same tactics Iran used to ‘fool’ us today were being used all the way back in the Crimean War (1853), considered the first war to ever have extensive journalistic and photographic coverage.  Back then there was no Photoshop or even MS Paint to change the pictures, but that didn’t stop journalists and their crews in editing the landscape themselves, throwing cannonballs onto the war-torn roads to add a level of destruction to their images.  There’s still not positive evidence the cannonballs were placed there on purpose, but when I first saw the picture, I almost immediately thought something looked suspicious about them.  However, people back then must have been horrified by the shots, probably having no inkling that they might be fabricated.

And that’s the powerful thing about the manipulation of photos; in the moment we could see them as real, but years from now others could look back and realize that many were just frauds, like we have with the Crimean War photos.  One of the most recent examples of this happened during the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and the famous Situation Room photo.  While watching The Colbert Report, Stephen reported that a Jewish newspaper had edited out the 2 females in the room (Audrey Tomason, and most notably Hillary Clinton) in their front page article on the story.
Here we see the picture as it was taken, and below is how the newspaper Di Tzeitung showed it,
Now to us, we know the image is clearly fake, but to all the people who read this newspaper, they now have a different view of what went on during the operation. And while it might not be conspiracy theory material, it tells a lot about what people will do to have their thoughts and views imposed on others. Not that every photo we see in a newspaper, magazine, or on the Internet is faked, but I’d take each one with a grain of salt, knowing it might not be the whole truth.

For the online scavenger hunt, the first item to find was an op-ed about a public school teacher labor dispute earlier than 1970.  Seeing how specific the item was, I went to Mason’s library database, and went to ProQuest’s Historical Newspaper portal.  Entering “labor dispute teachers” in the search bar, I went through each article one-by-one, and finally found a story that wasn’t written by a newspaper staff member (the definition of an op-ed) and was dated 1923 .  Here is the article.

The second item I needed to find was the earliest documented use of solar power in the United States.  For this, I went to Wikipedia and searched “solar energy,” and went to the development section of the article.  One of the paragraphs said that solar powered water heaters were used in America starting in the 1890s.  The footnote took me to a reference from an article written in 1981 by Butti and Perlin.  Googling “butti and perlin 1981 solar powered heater” I came across a book on Scribd titled ‘The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book.’  In the book author David Bainbridge says that solar powered water heaters appeared in America as far back as 1895, and shows a newspaper add for a Climax Solar-Water Heater that was published in 1902.  The book and add can be found here.

For the third article I needed to find was a history of California ballot initiatives and voting records.  This one was particularly hard for me to find, searching multiple databases (a number of ProQuest portals and JSTOR) and coming up with nothing.  I ultimately had to Google “california ballot voting data” and went to Sacramento State University’s website.  There I found a link to the university’s election data archive, which has all elections, poll results, and ballot initiatives from 1995 to the present.  The recorded data is here.

As the act of digitalizing historical documents and items becomes more widespread, the number of pros and cons of doing so increases too; a double-edged sword that in the long run could greatly help, or hamper the field of history.  The subset of digital history is so new and still emerging that it’s hard to tell what kinds of lasting problems we’ll have to face.  The boons of it though are already making themselves apparent, with a few busts to balance things out.

As one might expect, accessibility increases on an almost infinite scale with online digitalization.  Where a physical historical document can only be in one place at a given time, an online one can be accessed from anywhere on the planet, and by anyone who has a computer.  Someone as history-inept as me can now view thousands of artifacts and historical items that they’d otherwise have to travel far and wide to see in person.  Saving time and money also builds incentive for people to look up the digitalized versions: one might not want to drive or fly to a museum to see the Magna Carta, but going online and googling a digitalized copy of it is easy and fast.

This same accessibility that the average person might welcome has also become the focus of historians’ negative thoughts on digitalization.  Now that anyone can talk, view, and comment on or about certain historical artifacts, it takes away a level of trust that was present when only historians could write about them.  It also leads to the problem of biased information, where if anyone with an opinion can write, that writing might not be accurate or unbiased.  Of the opposite side of that, you have people who have selection bias are worrying about the influx of accessibility.  With so much new information, it’s harder for people to regulate the exact information they want others to here about and the rest that they want to keep unheard.  For the common person, this is a good thing, as it means more information with different views will be available.

One of the larger problems I see with digitalizing documents is the loss of value in the original.  It hasn’t started yet, but I wonder if they’ll be a time when something like this,
will be considered more valuable than a physical version of the Declaration Of Independence. As we keep digitalizing more and more, we need to remember the importance of actual documents, and real artifacts, rather than ones that can be found online.

Melih Bilgil’s video, “The History Of The Internet,” explains in great detail (with a good amount of confusion as well) how the Internet we currently know and use came to be, from nothing more than an idea to the incredible entity it is today.  With the Internet being such a large part of our daily lives, it’s hard to imagine it not even existing 50 years ago.  The advancements that allowed the Internet to be; and the developments it has produced are on a level of genius and power that few other inventions can claim.  As for the video (another wonder of the Internet), I think it did a lot right, but misstepped on some finer points.

The first bit of praise I have for the video is its art style.  The monochromatic, minimalistic animations are interesting and fun to watch, and visually kept me focused on the video throughout my time watching it.  Being a graphic designer, it’s not doubt that Bilgil knew the type of animation would be entertaining, and connect with the subject matter.  In fact, the art medium he uses in the video is known as PICOL (Pictorial Communication Language), and is itself a result of the Internet’s existence.

The video was very informative too, and despite the large amount of ground it had to cover, it presented a lot of knowledge in a fairly short time.  Information such as who was part of the Arpanet’s founding:

• The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)
• The United States’ RAND Corporation
• England’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL)
• France’s CYCLADES (Institut de Recherche d’Informatique et d’Automatique)

This was helpful to have so people know who should be credited (or blamed) for the Internet itself.  The timeline he gives is also helpful:

• 1957 – Time sharing on computers is made possible; the idea of computer network is presented (later to be the Arpanet)
• 1962 – Direct waves are made the primary transportation of information within the computer network
• 1966 – The official start to the development of the Arpanet
• 1990 – The Arpanet is shut down, and gives rise to the Internet

While you could criticize the video for being shallow, the time it’s allotted gives you more than enough information to create a basic foundation of knowledge on how the Internet was invented, as well as what the Arpanet was and how it helped the Internet grow into what it is.

The thing I found frustrating about the video was that it talked about certain technologies that I had no knowledge of, and did not explain them in any way.  The first minute of the video went completely over my head, with the batch programming and how people interacted with their large computers.  I can understand how that information was a vital part in how the Arpanet and Internet developed, but more explanations would have been nice so that I could understand the entire video, and not left to look up lost information.  Many of the protocols and codes were also presented vaguely, and not explained in any detail, which would have been nice to know their ramifications.

As a whole the video was very well done, with great animations and a wealth of knowledge easily presented.  The lack of fine details does not overshadow the fact that it is a quick way to learn the history of one of the greatest marvels in modern technology.  I’d encourage anyone who uses the Internet to watch this video so that they know more about the medium that is now one of the most important parts of our lives.