{"content":[{"text":"Iterations – Burba and Frana – Researching the History of Software","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.043136,"width":0.5300849999999999,"height":0.020212}},{"text":"The Web is still widely criticized as an unreliable source of information, but \n epithets like “Weird Wide Web” and “Cyberia” are hurled at it with much less \n frequency today. We manage our (dwindling) portfolios online today, stock our \n libraries with the help of Amazon.com, and download crucial virus updates to \n keep the whole system working properly. The Web today gives as good as it takes \n with its skewering online parodies of presidential aspirations, ICANN battles, and \n Microsoft heavies. In part, this change of heart reflects the increasing \n acceptability of the Internet as a communications medium. In equal measure, the \n thawing of opinion precipitates from our reevaluation of the Web as a promising \n marketing tool. After all, people get serious where money is at stake.","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.088591,"width":0.644196,"height":0.17703}},{"text":"Even the scholarly community has reevaluated the Web’s potential. Professors \n distribute course assignments and drafts of their latest papers and presentations \n from personal home pages. Online editions of The New York Times, The \n Washington Post, and the OED have wormed their way into the daily ritual \n alongside the morning cup of coffee and the afternoon walk to seminar. Email is \n checked with more regularity than the mailbox down the hall.","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.280257,"width":0.6308740000000002,"height":0.10733400000000004}},{"text":"Today, an array of online bibliographic databases like RLG-Eureka’s History of \n Science and Technology, OCLC-FirstSearch’s EconLit, America: History and \n Life and others have supplanted traditional journal indices. Catalogs such as \n OCLC-FirstSearch’s WorldCat and Chadwyck-Healey Inc.’s ArchivesUSA allow \n researchers more options in accessing resources in libraries and archives. While \n sources like these have long been available “pre-Web,” the Web has made them \n much easier to use. Recently the bibliographic power of the Web has increased \n immeasurably with the growth in “full-text” databases, which reproduce articles \n from many journals, and university faculty and staff rave about the speedy new \n services for electronic document delivery of their interlibrary loan requests. \n Certainly, the Web has become more than a matter of convenience for scholars— \n it is an indispensable tool for teaching and research.2","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.402227,"width":0.6411040000000001,"height":0.21187899999999993}},{"text":"But the Web is becoming even more than a tool for finding book and article \n citations and tracking down archival collections—it is also becoming a source for \n digitized versions of a wide array of materials valuable to historians. In this \n review we explore the New World of sources in the history of software available \n on the Web, and attempt to provide a map, or at least a series of guideposts, for \n this digital landscape. In the first part we will look at sources that parallel or bear \n a strong resemblance to the kinds of sources traditionally available in the “Old \n World” of archives and libraries. In the second part we will discuss sources from \n the more obscure corners of the Web, with little resemblance to traditional \n sources, and no traditional mechanisms for use by historians. All of the sources \n cited here are freely available on the Web, with the exception of some important \n resources available at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Web \n site.3","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.628742,"width":0.6408310000000002,"height":0.22930299999999992}},{"text":"2","bbox":{"left":0.495098,"top":0.934803,"width":0.00980399999999998,"height":0.020212000000000008}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}