Digital Pioneers

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane’s involvement with digitizing goes back to 1982, when he was a graduate student and had access to the first chunks of electronic texts and magnetic tape. Crane remembers something like 60 megabytes of classical Greek texts that were typed in and available for [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: Crane sees a lot of things that can now be done via the World Wide Web, but if the boundaries are pushed, problems arise and you run in to things that cannot be done generically. Crane thinks that the people in Google are inexorably [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Greg Crane is professor of Classical Studies at Tufts University and editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library. Crane’s first exposure to digital technology in the humanities came when he was still a graduate student at Harvard, and developed a full-text retrieval system for the Thesaurus [...]

Interview date: February 8, 2010 Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado Summary: From the start, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae designed all the data with concern for preservation and sustainability. The first data discs didn’t look very good and Crane and his colleagues knew it shouldn’t be made into their archival medium. In the 1980’s, it took [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: Initially, the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESLP) set the standards for what images everyone would contribute (namely, the museums and the Library of Congress). The project looked at every Kodak on the market at the time, taking an image and compressing it. Using the lossless jpeg [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Summary: Besser is a Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Masters Degree (MD) program at NYU. Besser has a zero percent time appointment as Senior Scientist for Digital Initiatives at NYU’s Libraries, working on projects with the Dean of Libraries. Besser has several [...]

Interview Date: March 4, 2010 Denver, Colorado Summary: In the late 1980s Besser and the Pacific Film Archive were way ahead in terms of technology and challenges. The hardest thing at that time was the fact that people did not have the software on their own machines to run the programs that could allow search [...]