Web sites, blogs, and other online publishing platforms are nothing new, at least, anymore. Although some may still view the web as “new,” in reality it has grown old. First proposed by a researcher at CERN in 1989, the first web page was online by 1990. That makes the web approximately 36 years old. The Internet itself is older still. Even if you date ubiquitous web publishing to the “web 2.0” era of social media, those platforms aren’t new anymore either. Blogger.com came online August 23, 1999. WordPress came online May 27th, 2003. WordPress, the baby of the blogging bunch, is over 13 years old, which is centuries in technology time. Given these dates, many of us have been publishing online for some time now.
Which brings us to the digital humanities, and more specifically, digital history. How you view the meaning of the word “digital” in this context relates to whether you still see digital technologies as “new.” A layman might be forgiven for assuming that “digital history” refers to the history of digital technology. This layman might expect a digital historian to be working on a book about the founding of the Internet, not the use of digital tools to create or distribute historical knowledge. However, in much of the scholarly world, the qualifying term “digital” in digital history is used to denote using digital tools in the research or publication process. From some perspectives, this is used to separate the use of technology in the production of history as different from “the regular way” of doing historical research. This distinction often raises concerns with how digital technologies disrupt the traditional scholarly research model and pose problematic issues[i].
However, there is much evidence to suggest that many historians are embracing digital tools and methods for research and publication. Oral historian Michael Frisch, in his article “Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Toward a Post Documentary Sensibility” discusses how digital tools are creating new capabilities for oral historians that improve the practice of oral history. In his article he describes how digital tools restore the “voice” of oral history through providing means of viewing the audio and video recordings directly, but also democratize oral history by disintermediating it from the documentary producer or historian who was the exclusive gatekeeper shaping the oral history prior to digital tools and platforms.[ii] A great example of this is the Visual History Archive produced by the USC Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. This archive houses oral histories of people who were witnesses to or people who lived through acts of genocide. This powerful primary source material would lose much of its potency if only available in text format as a transcript. However, through this archive researchers and the general public can review these audio-visual based oral history primary source materials directly. The archive also provides powerful digital tools for transcript search, indexed terms hyperlinking, and full biographical, timeline, and geo-location data.[iii]
Another emerging area of the use of digital tools for research involves Geographic Information Systems. Originally developed for urban planners, historians have begun to adopt tools like GIS software to examine historical events spatially. This “spatial turn,” in many cases has generated new narratives for well-documented historical events that would not be possible using conventional methods. These include Dr. Anne Knowles work recreating the landscape of Gettysburg as it existed in 1863 to show what General Robert E. Lee could and could not see from his vantage point during the Battle of Gettysburg and providing new insight into why he made the decisions he did.[iv]
The other area where historians are embracing digital tools and methods is in the distribution of historical research. In this arena, print has reigned supreme. Whether in academic journals or popular histories, printed text has been the primary delivery method. This is beginning to change however. Mark Sample, a professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College in Charlotte North Carolina aptly stated in an article on his blog that “The heart of the digital humanities is not the production of knowledge; it’s the reproduction of knowledge.”[v] In other words, digital history is about sharing research and data with others. A great example of this is the Spatial Humanities web site published by the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library. The site is a repository housing information on what spatial humanities is, how it is done, and listing various spatial humanities projects. Many of the projects listed on the site, in turn, are additional examples of historians using digital platforms and tools to share their work with a larger audience[vi].
In my own historical research, I utilize digital methods and tools for both research and distribution. My current project is a place history for a small neighborhood in North-Central Phoenix, Arizona. This neighborhood was developed as part of the post-war housing boom in Phoenix. This is a map of what the neighborhood looks like today:
This is a view of the neighborhood from the late-1940s:
My research to date has revealed discrepancies between the official Maricopa County Assessors Office records for the property in this neighborhood and other primary documents such as historical photos like the one above and newspaper articles from the late-1940s. The newspaper articles and photos suggest the neighborhood is older than the county records state.
This is an example of how digital tools and archives can be used to create new knowledge that traditional methods would struggle to deliver. Cross-referencing hundreds of county property records with multiple decades of newspapers articles and aerial photographs all in paper format would be prohibitive. With digital tools, however, it can be done efficiently and leads to both new knowledge and insight into historical methods.
In my case, this led me to think considerably about why these discrepancies might exist. Here is a podcast where I discuss issues with property record primary sources and the cross referencing methodologies I found effective in dealing with these issues:
I plan to use my blog to distribute new finding on my place history (as well as other projects), but also to discuss issues and trending topics in historical research and methodology like the subject of my podcast above.
For the humanities in general, and history specifically, digital tools and methods posts both new challenges and new opportunities. Beyond mere efficiency gains, these tools allow us to consider more sources in novel ways than we ever could before. Likewise, they allow us to share these digitally powered findings to a much larger audience enhancing our ability to share and discuss emerging historical thought. This sharing aspect alone will be transformative, since it gets at an issue gnawing at the side of the humanities for years: Relevance. No longer confined solely to academic journals, digital platforms promise to unbind work in the humanities, freeing it to engage with the world widely.
[i] Anne Burdick et al, Digital Humanities, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012), 15-16.
[ii] Michael Frisch, “Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Toward a Post Documentary Sensibility.” In The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 102-114. New York: Routledge, 2006.
[iii] “Visual History Archive.” USC Shoah Foundation. Accessed October 30, 2016, https://sfi.usc.edu/vha.
[iv] Patricia Cohen, “Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land,” New York Times, Last modified July 26, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/arts/geographic-information-systems-help-scholars-see-history.html.
[v] Mark Sample, “The digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing,” Samplereality.com, Accessed October 30, 2016, http://www.samplereality.com/2011/05/25/the-digital-humanities-is-not-about-building-its-about-sharing/
[vi] “Spatial Humanities.” Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. Accessed October 30, 2016, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/.