This week’s readings for Clio Wired were chosen to help illuminate how we can define digital history. After reading, I feel that I still know more about what isn’t digital history, however. Digital history is not merely digitization projects (big or small), or just presenting a paper online on a blog. Digital history is more about the interactivity of technology and history, and making connections about the past that just weren’t possible in the field of “traditional history.” I’m still having trouble coming up with my own definition, but I’m hoping that by the end of the course I will have a much more concrete example.
Some of the readings, such as William G. Thomas II’s “Computations and Historical Imagination” essay in A Companion to Digital Humanities, revealed that computers were first used for historical research in the the 1940s and 50s as tools for conducting quantitative research, followed by a second revolution in the 1960s and 70s. While useful for compiling and analyzing social data, some research lacked context, as notably seen in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s controversial book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. We are now in the middle of a third digital history revolution, and it’s exciting to think about how the next generation will address digital history as well. Also intriguing to me in the Thomas’ article was my introduction to the term, “cliometrics” or quantitative history.
As the readings traversed time from 1999 – this year, I noticed many themes across them. One being open access. Having worked in libraries for a long time, I have always been a proponent of open access and was glad to know that digital historians feel the same way. I think it also relates to the ideal of the “democratization of history” that allows information to be shared and accessible to anyone with access to a computer, whether its through a personal machine or one at the library.
The Interchange from the Journal of American History is a helpful introduction to the current state of digital history by means of an online discussion between many of the leaders in the digital history field today. By addressing some of the past and current projects, the panelists offered their insights into what it means to be a digital historian. I came away from this reading, as with others, with a belief that knowing how to be a good historian involves understanding all of the tools available, including digital ones. If we want to continue in the digital history field, learning how to actually create digital history projects is crucial.