Digitalizing historical documents in the current disruptive industrial era

Abstract

Since not many studies conducted in the area of digitalization of historical documents, this study is undoubtedly significant to carry out. Specifically, this study explores the importance and the benefits of digitalizing historical documents. The ethnographic research uses questionnaires and interviews for data collection. The questionnaire items are made available digitally so that participants in this study can complete and submit to the researchers digitally. The questionnaire items are analyzed digitally using google drive software and the interviews are analyzed qualitatively to triangulate data from the questionnaires. The participants of the study included 40 respondents who are both art observers and academics. The researchers choose participants purposively because of their knowledge, their involvement in the digitalization, and their experiences in the historical documents. The result of the study shows that various perspectives appear from participants in the relation of the importance of digitalizing historical documents. More importantly, the digitalization can be a benefit for artists, academics, art observers, art lovers, and the public art community. Digitalization of historical documents can be useful for teaching and learning, research purposes, document history of civilization, marketing, socialization, portray of artists and prediction of the future of the civilization. This study implies that this research can be a model for exploring the digitalization of historical documents in a similar geographical setting worldwide.