Week 10, CONCLUSION-S on "From the British Empire to the Commonwealth: The land issue"

Week 10, Answers to the TEST + Conclusions on “From the British Empire to the Commonwealth: The Land Issue”

As we have seen previously ( The Land issue , Wed. 4^th April 2023) I wanted to make a small digression on the importance of digital humanities in cultural preservation.

● What does digital humanities refer to?

Definition:

Oxford dictionary: an academic field concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional disciplines such as literature, history and philosophy (in French: Humanités numériques).

→ What are the advantages of digital humanities over traditional humanities?

- quicker access to info through digital access

- combine different data sources

- develop the skill of hyper reading

-  democratizing primary sources and other types of documents.

→  What are the disadvantages of digital humanities over traditional humanities?

-          online resources distance the researcher / reader from the actual archive, book , artefact

-          Problems linked to methodology. How to use it?

-          copyright limit 

→ Example:  Google’s investment in this field

Digitized books (40 million books in more than 500 languages. see: https://blog.google/products/search/google-books-library-project/#logistics) Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research for 2023-2025. Google’s Digital humanities Research Awards will support 12 university research groups with grants for 1 year (mostly American universities)

Among the examples of primary sources and their digital versions (maps – map of D. Livingstone’s travels, for example- correspondences, official documents : https://livingstoneonline.org/in-his-own-words) I used the Treaty of Waitangi. This treaty shows the importance of original documents and their impact on future generations. Thus, we have seen that preserving documents and making them available to anyone via the internet makes sense. 

●  Example of the Treaty of Waitangi:

 It was put into a safe in the Colonial Secretary’s Office in Auckland then transferred to Wellington after it became the capital of New Zealand in 1865. There were attempts to restore it in 1910 but it was not successful. In 1977-78: new restoration. Since 2017, it has been on display at the National Library of NZ in Wellington. As you can see on the digital documents, the treaty consists in 2 sheets

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