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.