Saturday, October 6, 2012

Readings for Week 1

The selection of readings for this week present an introduction to the world of digital history. What exactly is digital history, one might ask? Digital history might be described as any sort of presentation of historical content on a digital format, like: online news articles, museum exhibits, or online scholarly journal databses. Modern historians are inevitably confronted with resources online which present history of all fields in a number of different mediums. In order for future historians, as well as contemporary, to cope with this revolution of information, there must be some set of principles and methods to be established in the field.

Since the advent of the internet and the coming of the digital age, historical information has steadily been posted to the web for anyone to access freely. One of the on-going discussions about this recent revolution has been about the accurate and reliable presentation of this information. Modern websites like Wikipedia have revolutionized the way in which people access information by allowing anybody with a notion to write on any topic and have it published for the rest of the world to see. This has consequently led to a "Wild West" of historical reporting. With so much information just a few clicks away, the digital age has allowed people of all backgrounds with a computer or a smart phone to access literally any topic.


Is traditional history a thing of the past?
To be sure, I love to use websites like www.Wikipedia.com to quickly look up a topic for general information. The question that arises here however, is this: How can we be sure that the information reported is from a reliable source? Trained historians will be able to distinguish fact from bunk, but that doesen't stop less adept (or lazy) researchers like high school students from taking advantage of such a user friendly tool.

All of this leads me to one conclusion: the advances in information technology are growing faster and ever more complex as we continue into the digital age. In order to adapt to these advances historians must be contantly vigilant and thoughtful of modern tools like Wikipedia and the hundreds of other information data bases.

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