When I began my journey into understanding what digital history last year, I truly only thought of it as the bare bones. I thought of archiving and digitizing papers, then putting them in a PDF format. Sure this is a part of DH, but a miniscule part really.
Okay so if DH is more than digitizing, what is it? That answer seems to be expanding as it finds itself more centralized as a method for historians to present their findings. Digital History can be anything from creating maps to visually show findings, or making materials available to the public. DH has started to reach its hand into all parts of the humanities which has also shaped the career and the use of DH itself.
Seeing the evolution of Digital History from the 1990’s, when it was ahead of its time, there is a bit of a plateau until about 2008. There was a revived interest in pushing the envelope to find what else could be done with this method of work. This early progression was well documented by Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas in their article Intersections: History and New Media- What is Digital History where they dive into that early understanding of what digital history could become from 2009 forward. They even dedicate a whole section to what the future of digital history should look like in their opinion. Using tools at students’ disposal, like Google anything, plus making these tools more accessible would expand the humanities as a whole.
The different ways that this methodology is used is also dissented by Ian Milligan in his book History in the Age of Abundance? : How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research. Milligan points out how social media from its early forms can even be used for interdisciplinary studies. An example is how the increased use of Twitter by politicians becomes a different type of primary source. This shows the politics of the time and the social reception of it. There are pro and cons to this as there are only so many people using Twitter, but it gives historians an idea of how the public reacted.
Looking at Digital History as a whole, it is constantly be shaped to what it can be used for and what it is being used as. There is always room for improvement, but there are so many tools to use as well as new uses for the tools already in existence everyday. I am interested and eager to see how this will continue to evolve and what more I can learn!
One of the interesting things about digital history is how easily it shades over into digital humanities sometimes – that is, using all the same data, tools, and publication platforms as digital history but to ask questions that are not quite historical in nature. (E.g. I study conference Twitter networks which is certainly digital scholarship, but is not historical scholarship at least until the 2010s are a bit further in the past!) Interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaborations are one of the strengths of DH, but also can make it hard for more traditional historians to understand what DHers are doing.
The idea of twitter playing a role in future historical discussions has always been a weird but understandable rationale. With limited characters, people will attempt to put the maximum effort to getting what they truly mean in a single post and subsequent threads. Being able to pinpoint how society reacts around different crucial events in history is a big part of a historian’s work and these bite-sized slices of life will play a role in future historical analysis!
What do you think is your intersection with digital history then? Why take this class? (other than it might be a requirement lol)
That’s a good question honestly. The cop-out answer is that this intersects will all humanities and it would benefit me to learn. My true answer is, I’m not sure yet what my intersection is yet but this has peaked my interest and I am willing to find out haha