Seeing Red

Digital images are, perhaps, the most obvious example of how we use data storage in our lives at Hope College. We find images stored in digital format all over our Facebook pages and images of every person who has accessed moodle in the last five minutes on the moodle site and images on PowerPoint presentations in class. All of which are stored using binary notation.

One of the most interesting connections I experienced was in my African history class during a PowerPoint presentation. The professor pulled up the presentation to show us a map of Africa. The screen we saw showed Africa, but only in the color red. Initially I thought there was a red lens over the screen, but that was not the case. The mystery of “Red Africa” remained until later in the week when we learned how eight bits for each of the colors red, green, and blue are used to represent images. This led me to believe that for some reason the bits for blue and green had either not been stored as part of the PowerPoint document or were simply not being accounted for and those colors were not being displayed; although, exactly why this occurred is yet to be discovered.

Another example of data storage at Hope College is 1Hope email. Down at the bottom of the email screen it shows how much of your allocated storage is being used. As far as I can tell each student receives 7940 MB for data storage on their email. Currently I am using only 41MB. This is likely due to the fact that there are not many, if any, images (which can take up lots of storage space) on the emails I receive. Therefore mainly text information (which does not usually take up much space) is what needs to be stored.