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.