We are in a time period when the paper and digital book struggle for the top spot, much the way scrolls and printed books competed for it during the print revolution. Our practice will truly change when the scale tips to reflect the desire of the majority of historians to engage and use digital technology.  I see no reason to disbelieve that a hundred years from now, books will be collectors items.  This will make digital research, books, writing, and interpretation completely normal in the history profession.

Obviously I have questions and concerns about the professional aspects of this change, because I hope to make a living in the history profession, quite soon.  I absolutely want to be proficient, and do history in the traditional sense because it is the way to become an expert and to be respected in my field, right now.  However, I have no intention of being left behind as the generations after me use digital tools in a native way to become historians.  So here I am, learning how to be a digital historian, too.  Wish me luck!

Reading Highlights

Tanaka: Our relationship with time has influenced our interpretation of history.  Our version of historical practice started in the 18th century.  Our sense of history is linear. Temporality is another way to interpret history.  Human society is temporal, technology is linear.  There is a tension here that makes some historians uncomfortable (?).  This tension underlies problems of historical interpretation.  Historical expertise is now so specialized that we become inflexible specialists, unable to interpret the bigger human experiences of history .

Dorn: Digital history is just another historiographical  development. Digital history is growing and maturing.  Primary sources and the “data objects” tied to them, publishing platforms,  and the first-mover advantage should give historians confidence in their academic use of digital tools.  We are starting to legitimize digital historical scholarship, annotation, professional recognition (tenureship).  Dorn lists several “tools” used in digital history right now.  They are tools for argumentation; teaching and learning; artifact and event presentation.  Dorn makes an excellent point: these tools match up well “to the traits of existing scholarly infrastructure for historians.”  It is up to us to evaluate the scholarly work in creating the tools and infrastructure. (italics mine).  Major issue:  collaboration vs lone scholar reviewed by small group of experts.  Digitization allows for transparency and collaboration.  How do we make that scholarly?

Hughes:  I consider this compilation of articles a deep dive into the state of digital history  in 2008.  There were many digital history/archaeology issues in this compilation which I had never encountered before.  The experts at this conference were in the thick of it, reporting on their projects and experiences.  I will just note the three ways Information and Communications Technology (ICT) “methods […] were being used to create new knowledge in history and archaeology” (193).  By 1) addressing research questions otherwise unable to be resolved. 2) Asking new research questions. 3) Facilitating and enhancing existing research.  I would like to know how things have progressed in the last seven years, and I think this course will help me figure that out.

The readings for week 2 focused on the role of lay public-created historical narratives in doing history. One of the more important points I think was discussed was Wolff’s point that the lay public often relates historical narratives in an attempt to promote specific worldviews (this of course implies that trained historians are less susceptible to this, though certainly not invincible). Wolff’s discussion of Wikipedia and the entry on the Origins of the American Civil War included how certain editors engaged in fierce web debates over the validity of their contributions to this period of history and how their arguments revealed possible views on the world today. This is an important point to make, as shaping history to promote beliefs about current events is something that is dangerous to the study of history.

I was reminded of a time my cousin argued that public support for the United States entering World War II was overwhelming on the belief that the U.S. was need to defeat the Axis nations. He argued this as a parallel which justified the modern day wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In my years exposed to the academy and professional historians, being required to read for classes, etc., I know that public at the time had mixed to negative feelings regarding the U.S. entering the war, but here was a completely different interpretation of history, no sources presented, being presented to argue in favor of completely different wars in completely different contexts.

A valid question arises from this story and the articles of Wolff and Madsen-Brooks: because it shapes a worldview, is it less valid? Now of course, in my story, I know from historical texts that my cousin’s assertion is not true, and though he didn’t present sources, maybe he’d read other historical texts that examined similar data and resulted in different arguments.

I found an additional article, titled Digital Archives: Democratizing the Doing of History by Cheryl Mason Block (found on Google Scholar searching ‘digital history’). The article details a study of graduate students who were middle school history teachers and having them use a digital archive and hypertext documents to write a research paper. The resulting find was that history becoming more learner-oriented. As these students searched through documents in random sequence (not page by page like with traditional books) the students sought information that they had been exposed to, but knew less about (the information had been often omitted from their school’s textbooks) and wished to know based on what they liked to teach.

This is important because of the potential for an individual’s beliefs about history to influence what they learn. If my cousin wanted to justify a modern war by examining the date through a hypertext document, he might miss information that otherwise would prove his argument wrong. While hypertext documents have an incredible potential for teaching history, people picking and choosing evidence (or not examining all the evidence in sequence) could lead to more information being presented as history, as in the Wikipedia article on the Origins of the American Civil War. People like User 172 and my cousin have searched historical documents and primary sources, but information presented in a hypertext format could lead to inaccurate information being debated as history.

To me, this highlights the importance of trained historians, those who know how to examine sources, place the sources in context of other sources, and draw conclusions by acknowledging the many contexts. As with any tool, digital history should be used appropriately and carefully, with the proper instruction preparing you to use it.

The week 1 readings explore the common theme of digital history altering what is today the typical methods of doing history. The book has been the typical, authoritative presentation of history, but the advent of digital history has become a challenge to this default authoritativeness. Digital history is challenging the authority positions enjoyed by the book and the historian, but also the notion of who will be recognized as legitimate historians: professional historians, anyone with an internet connection and an interest in history or a synthesis of the two?

Dorn sees digital history as a challenge to the conventional methods of arguing about history. He states that digital history can be used to redraw the boundaries of the discipline, taking the process of doing history (question, (primary source) research, writing, editing, peer-reviewing, rewriting, editing, publishing) public via a wide range of digital history projects, from online archives to interactive maps to complementary websites. These projects would make doing history more inclusive and more visible to those normally excluded from the process of writing books.

Tanaka sees digital history and this redrawing of the discipline’s boundaries as the study of history returning to and/or incorporating past methods of doing history. By incorporating different viewpoints, social organizations, and understandings of time, history can become more understanding of context and “ethical” as opposed to strictly chronological, as it has become under the relatively new professional historians.

Naturally, there are inherent benefits and risks of history becoming more open. Professional historians have studied extensively, not just facts and dates, but also the research process. They know how to react to primary sources and how to appropriately reach conclusions based on those sources while also maintaining an awareness of other secondary scholarship. Anyone with an internet connection can write history, but this process of knowing how to read primary sources is often overlooked, and as such, untrained historians could reach controversial, problematic, even false conclusions. That’s not to say trained historians are immune to such shortcomings, but it is less likely with more training in the historical process.

Ultimately, I think untrained historians can contribute, many of them significantly and extensively, to the process of doing history. However, as their path to learning how to write history has not been critiqued and reviewed by professional historians, their writings and contributions need to be more closely examined before being taken into full consideration.

I picked up a book, Teaching History in the Digital Age, by T. Mills Kelly (2013) not because I necessarily want to teach digital history.  However, I am interested in how education is dealing with digital history.  I think a view from both sides will be helpful to any historian who wants to put their work out on the web, institutionally or in general.  We should have an idea how our digital work will be looked at.  It isn’t impossible that our digital audience will include students.  So, I will report back on the insights that Kelly provides after I read it.

Read about this book here.

3/1/15

So far the most important thing I have learned from this book is how to teach college students to use digital sources properly.  We can’t just say be careful out there!  Kelly makes the point that just because students are native technology users, it doesn’t mean they automatically know what a trustworthy digital source is (46).  Even professional historians get duped.

Also, more applicable this term, if I understand how students use the internet for research, I may be able to design a digital history project to be more helpful and informative to people looking for that information; not just students, but everyone who is interested.  This point reminds me of my experience in the UNR inaugural class called Digitizing History (History 300a) in which we had to try to figure out how to condense historical information for a website.  It was a difficult thing to do.  Maybe this will help me in the future: (from page 23).

• What happened?
• When did it happen?
• Why did it happen?
• Who was responsible?

This seems very fundamental, but I promise, as a historian trying to translate a comprehensive, scholarly narrative to the web, these basics can get buried. I will keep these basics in mind for future digital projects.

These reading suggest that digital history has allowed/assisted the practice of history to evolve into something that is more than, and outside of, traditional “history as an argument about the past”.  The central ideas of our readings revolve around philosophies about infrastructure which acts as the basis for debate on this subject matter.

Historians have relied upon a specific infrastructure, that of the monograph, which is a carefully constructed argument based on primary sources and the historiography that surrounds those sources.  Digital tools allow for an expanded view of the vital elements of “doing” history, but it also allows for the exclusion of traditional argumentation and infrastructure. As we discussed in class, the concern here is the inability to evaluate and use digital sources and the dismantling of the traditional academic framework.  Not only are we, as Dorn states, “redefining the boundaries of history”, we are tearing down the very walls that create professionalism and harbor expertise in our field.

This problem is not dealt with in the article as both works are dedicated to supporting the rise of digital history (Tanaka states that it is not new to change perspective and that digital history is just another shift in perspective).  Perhaps the advantages of Digital history could be balanced with the disadvantages in ways that are beneficial to both the academic and the layman using some of the principles in the texts and taking the time to evaluate the best infrastructures before we proceed.