The National Archives has the mission of cataloging millions of records ranging from the important (presidential speeches and decrees) to the mundane (internet tweets) every year, and with the explosive growth of digital media they’ve found themselves at a bit of a quandary. First off, how do you store the massive amounts of data we generate every day? Then, how do you find anything inside the giant mountain of data. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) partnered with the NSF to create some new digital archival and visualization technology shown in an article on the TACC website.
“Archival analysis is a multi-layered process and it is unique to each collection that is being assessed,” explained Maria Esteva, a digital archivist and data management and collections researcher at TACC. “We are conducting research to map analysis processes used by archivists onto a visualization that combines data driven analysis tools. In this way, the archivist can integrate his or her experience into the workflow.”
The first step in the project was to represent a large and heterogeneous archival collection.
“We are all familiar with desktop icons, representing folders and files,” Esteva said. “But imagine a screen clogged with millions of such icons, with little clue as to what is inside. It takes a visual representation to show millions of files at a time.”
via Texas Advanced Computing Center: A Window on the Archives of the Future.
