Course Learning Objectives #5

Digitization is the process of turning real-world information into numbers that computers can understand. For text, this means converting written words into digital characters by typing or scanning, where each letter is stored as a code; this makes text easy to store, search, and share, but it can lose details like handwriting style or layout. For sound, digitization involves using a microphone to capture sound waves and then taking many small samples of those waves each second, turning them into numbers; higher sampling captures better sound quality but creates larger files, while lower sampling saves space but loses detail. In both cases, the main tradeoff in digitization is balancing quality and accuracy against storage size and efficiency.