Unit II: The players in Digital History

Last week some big questions were posed. What is Digital History? What are its promises to historical studies and the way in which people access, manipulate, and interpret information. It may be a stretch to predict where the field will go and how big it will become in the future. By using the tools and web applications currently available to the public, however, we can at least identify the and master the tools from which the field of digital history is based.

In what ways do both professional and amateur historians utilize the internet for the collection and presentation for history? The web is full of historically based sites that incorporate digital images, primary text documents, audio and visual media, and even 3-D mapping. Historical institutions like the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media, and the University of Nebraska Center for Digital Research in the Humanities have provided links to digital projects around the web in addition to some of the basic programs which historians of the digital age often use, like Zotero and Omeka.

The dawning of the digital age has allowed historical documents from all era's the ability to be digitized and stored in huge online databases. Some of these databases have allowed at least some of the collection to go public on the web. Google alone has undertaken a project to digitize millions of books both in and out of print. Google's project is as daunting as it is revolutionary. For the first time ever, the access to so many books has become available in one place, and with relative ease to navigate.

The readings this week touch on the hesitancy of the fields of the Humanities to 'buy in' to the new wave of digital scholarship. I can't help but think that this reluctant attitude must be in part some innate 'fear' which historians have with properly using and understanding the tools of digital history. In other words, historians will cling to their own traditional methods before they give in to learning the new ones. Too be fair, I can admit to some similar sentiment. What I am learning now however, is that digital history does not mean being able to decipher complicated codes, or even being able produce complex web pages. The tools for creating history in these types of mediums are readily available and, usually, user friendly enough for anyone to learn.