booktorrent

From booktorrent

Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the Internet network, and software systems.

William G. Thomas III, "The Promise of Digital History"

What is a "digital history"?

A digital history is one that makes use of digital media to disseminate or investigate stories of the past. These digital media can include audio and video recordings, digitized versions of diaries and letters, or even video games. The wide array of media that can be used in digital histories creates a potential for great success and great failure.

Examples of digital histories:

Benefits of digital histories

Working with virtual resources meant that we could handle and generate electronic content outside the usual constraints of mounting shows or publishing books. We didn't have to worry about the scale and configuration of a defined area in a museum, about the logistics and expense of hanging objects, or about how many full-color illustrations or pages of text a publisher would allow.

Carl Smith, "Can You Do Serious History on the Web"

Checking citations

Unlike its printed counterpart, the accuracy of sources and citations can be ascertained much more easily. The practice of "tagging" allows historians to provide immediate and direct access to any source available online.

Open source history

The advent of Web 2.0 computing affords anyone with a computer and an internet connection an opportunity to try their hand at historical practices. As we have seen with Wikipedia, open source history proves both to be an efficient use time, money, and resources. Theoretically, open source history is a more egalitarian way to conduct history, but this remains to be seen.

Issues with digital histories

Ultimately, we want to create a resource with as few assumptions built into it as possible, and leave the end user with as much freedom as possible for manipulating it.

Robert Shoemaker, "Digital London"

Excesses of information

One of the benefits of digital media is its ease of creation and distribution. However, when constructing a digital history, historians express complaints about wading through the jungle-like terrain created by this massive surplus of information. As Dr. Paul Turnbull and Chris Blackall word it,

Locating historical information in digital forms remains a time-consuming and frustrating business should one venture into the digital landscape beyond the on-line public access catalogues of major research libraries.

It would be impossible for a historian to utilize all of sources that make up the wealth of digital media on their single topic, so digital historians have to be selective about which pieces they use. The exclusion of different sources creates a bias that is inherent in the history itself, something of which historians must be constantly aware.

Link rot

Most digital histories reside on the Internet, and rely on a compendium of web-based sources to provide information or further reading. Unfortunately, the lifespan of these links is notoriously short, and access the these sites suffers from a phenomenon known as "link-rot," in which the link loses its viability when the linking site is moved, redesigned, or deleted.

Tools for digital historians

Once history postgraduate training involved attending seminars on theory and methodology. Now many also attend sessions on writing for more diverse audiences. We would do well to think of a future in which postgraduate training includes understanding how to prepare historical scholarship for the virtual environment.

Paul Turnbull and Chris Blackall, "A New Foreign Country: The Challenges and Risks of Making History in Digital Media for Historians and Librarians"

Bibliographic managers

There is a wide selection bibliographic management software available for download or purchase to anyone with a computer. Bibliographic managers are incredibly useful for storing and sharing reference materials, constructing bibliographies, and even citing sources. With the advent of bibliographic managers, historians operating within the digital realm can provide immediate access to the materials or documents, provided they have been digitized and made available on the web. Some of the prominent and easy-to-use bibliographic managers include RefWorks and Zotero.

Archiving software

One of the greatest strengths of working with a digital history is immediate, direct access to an online archive of relevant primary documents. In order to construct an effective digital history, historians can utilize archiving software to build online archives of digitized primary documents, photos, and video and audio recordings. There is a variety of archiving software programs available, each of which serves a different but equally valuable purpose. Programs include Dreamweaver, The Archivists' Toolkit, and LibraryScope. Learn more about digital archiving on the booktorrent wiki, available here.

Text mining

Text mining, characterized as a form of "distant reading", offers content analysis of primary documents. Google's Ngram viewer offers a basic form of text mining that uses Google's extensive digital library to look at how often a particular word or phrase is mentioned throughout published literary history. Essentially, text mining software sifts through large amounts of text and pulls out specific nuggets of information that are valuable to the individual doing research. Popular text mining software includes Carrot2 and Attensity.

Spatial history

Another strength of digital media its ability to seamlessly incorporate different forms of media in one single source. Spatial history utilizes maps imagery to add context to the the textual information already provided by most digital histories. Historians can use programs like Google Maps and ArcGIS to mark where and when events occurred, as well as provide a visual representation of facts about communities and locations.

Personal tools