Three Types of Digital Material: Digitized, Born-digital, and Reborn-digital

Digitized Material

Digitized material is the output of digitizing non-digital, or analog, material.  In other words, the digitized material was not originally digital.  Written paper documents, parchment, audio from radio, audio and video from television, etc., are examples of analog material that undergoes a process of digitization to convert these materials into digital form.  This process may include entering written documents into a word processor, or scanning written files or imagery, or re-recording audio with digital means.

 

Born-Digital Material

Born-digital material is any media that has always existed in digital form, and where there is no corresponding analog material.  Examples include DVD and the Internet.

 

Reborn-Digital Material

Reborn-digital material refers to digitally collected and preserved born-digital material, and which has undergone a change during the process.  Material in a web archive is an example of a reborn-digital resource. This concept requires further clarification.  Born-digital material on the Internet and accessible through the World Wide Web (or simply “the Web”, or “WWW”) is constantly changing at an extremely rapid rate. Recognition of the relentless rate of change of Internet (and Web) resources and the societal importance of these resources necessitate historical preservation of Internet content, especially as an historical resource for future endeavours.

 

The category of digitized/digital material has large implications for their use in digital humanities scholarship, as particular characteristics of each of digital material influences how they are understood and used by researchers (Brügger, 2016).

 

The decade of the 1960s saw the inception of humanities computing, computational linguistics, and digital history.  At this stage, the digitized material was the main focus of investigation, which was facilitated by large mainframe computers, and later, by networked computers.

 

Born-digital material, or material that was digital at the outset, was the focus in the 1990s, an era in which New Media Studies and Internet Studies came into being.  These two fields of study are sometimes not considered to be part of digital humanities proper, but are understood to be such if focus on the humanistic components of new media or the Internet, respectively.

 

In the early 2000s, historically inflected subfields of Internet studies arose, where the archived web and other preserved born-digital material became objects of investigation.  Consequently, the focus became reborn-digital material (Brügger, 2016).

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Contemporary Digital Humanities Copyright © 2022 by Mark P. Wachowiak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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