Category Archives: digital history

Finding Online Digital History Projects

digital history, digital history projects, HIST696, practicum

This week’s practicum required our class to search for digital history projects on our research area of interest. I’m interested in 19th century US history, specifically on the social history of rural America. However, when searching good ol’ Google, this topic didn’t receive much attention. So I decided to hone in a little more on the impact of railroads and tried search strings such as (railroad digital history project) and (19th century US railroad history digital projects) and found a variety of results. Some were good, some not so good, and some were great. The usual suspect of the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project led me to historical railroad maps, which was published online in 1998. However, a link on that page directed me to a newer presentation of the maps. The newer page obviously looks more clean and visually appealing, but I am glad the original is still up on the web for comparison. The map collection is searchable and downloadable, and each map is displayed with its bibliographic cataloging information as well. There are also articles and essays that provides context for the maps.

Another good example is Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project, which is still in development. The website offers a sampling of digitized materials that range from photographs to manuscripts, with oral histories and artwork as well, among other sources. The website promises to make the entire collection digitally accessible when it is finished, so online researchers are only left with a handful of primary sources at the moment. However, the website itself is easy to use and also includes a timeline of events that surround the topic of Chinese railroad workers, and it is one I’ll be bookmarking to come back to within the next year or so.

The most complete digital history project on this topic that I was able to find is William G. Thomas’ Railroad and the Making of Modern America project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  The project is broken up into ten different topics, such as Slavery and Southern Railroads, the 1877 Railroad Strike, the Origins of Segregation, and other socially historic related topics. Each topic contains original documents that relate to the theme, which ranges from manuscripts/letters, to maps and photographs, and even payroll records. The site itself also has a section called “Views” which are basically mini-digital history projects in themselves. The Views contain essays and related documents, and even maps and charts, thus presenting history in a contextualized manner. There’s also space dedicated just to data, which includes historical GIS, a search function (which I found to not work with any of my searches), and a place for educators to find teaching materials for their own class use. There is also a page dedicated to student work at UNL that relates to the role of the railroad in American history. This project contains a well-curated selection of materials, but the problems I encountered with searching makes me believe that exploring this project could take a long time since I’ll have to rely mainly on browsing the collection.

What is Digital History?

digital history, HIST696, readings

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.