A Series of Historical Tubes

Exploring the Digital Landscape

Boilerplate exploring the arctic

Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web gives a good introduction to the glories and pitfalls of digital scholarship.  Seven years after its publication (2005) it is beginning to show its age in certain areas(It references the "hundreds" of historical articles on Wikipedia for instance.  But it remains a great look at the early internet, which produced the historical projects we now look to as reference, such as the famous Valley of the Shadow project. Cohen and Rosenzweig were prescient in predicting the rise of better reading technologies to replace the glowing back-lit screen (e-ink displays), and the increasing acceptance among "traditional" historians of digital tools. 

University of Virginia's "The Valley of the Shadow" project has become a classic of internet scholarship.

Cohen again argues, in a discussion published by the Journal of American History, that the use of searches and GIS tools to map complex data over longer and longer periods of time will enable scholars to make breakthroughs unavailable to "old fashioned" scholarship.  This “distant reading”, will enhance the abilities of scholars in new and unpredictable ways.  William J. Turkel in the same discussion argues that the ubiquity of digital tools in historical research, predicted by these early pioneers, has already taken place.  "The idea that digital history can be marginalized depends on the perception that the Internet is somehow external to our real business. But seriously, how much research can we get done during a power outage?"

In an article by Patricia Cohen of the New York Times, it is argued that digital tools are already re-shaping the traditional structure of historical research, while another by Katie Hafner shows the problems inherent in digitization, where exuberant costs and stultifying copy-write laws threaten new projects.  

Digital Humanities projects such as Rome Reborn are using web tools to bring an ancient city to life.

This new field is subject to vast amounts of reflection and self critique, as was done by William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers in their digital history project "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of two American Communities", which is as much a proof of concept and experiment in web scholarship as it is an article about 19th century America.   

A narrative map of Ayers and Thomas' "Differences slavery Made" project.

They found that complex interlinked and unfocused web narratives created confusion and uncertainty, and worse, caused some to miss the thesis altogether.  A more streamlined design greatly aided the project.

While historians continue to have a reputation as stuffy and erudite scholars hunched over great tomes in empty libraries, the field is destined to change and grow as the rest of the world has, into the digital landscape.  

       Andrew Torget argues that digital history is not a separate field, but just another historical tool.