So, What is “Digital History”?
Part 1:
Not “born digital”
Unlike the majority of my fellow History students in 2012, I
was not “born digital”, so to speak. In
some ways I think this gives me a tangible perspective on the impact of the
digital revolution on our experience of ‘History’, as it has been a personal
one. To highlight just how “not
digital” my formative years were I’ll focus on an aspect of my “analog”
past. Those of you who are still Harry
Potter fans will have a romantic insight into my education, since J.K. Rowling
drew her fiction from her own British upbringing. Though
the quill had been relinquished for the “fountain pen” (my first fountain pen was an Osmiroid, http://hans.presto.tripod.com/nibs/osmiroid02.html ), I knew no one in school or college who solicited the use of a typewriter for
the purpose of writing essays. (BTW here is a video of my old school as it
is today and, interestingly, times have changed, especially for the girls, though accents have not. https://www.youtube.com/embed/H4B9K8y_QNY?rel=0
)
In fact I was encouraged to take horticulture over typing in
high school because as an academically inclined student I would have no need of
typing! For those in the U.S. who find
this hard to believe and for a fascinating discourse on the history of typing
and in particular its impact on women’s work in the U.K. take a look at the
following excellent blog by the Guardian’s Jane Martinson.
These diversions bring me appropriately to my:
Insight number 1
Digital History is
not static and linear, rather it is flexible and “hypertextual”.
As Cohen and Daniel point out in “Digital History: a Guide
to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web”, Digital History defies
old conceptual systems which are static, hierarchical and predictable in form
and encourages its audience to explore and to create its own epistemological
standards. From the users point of view
this is just the natural way to interact with the Internet.
I
know that I am not alone in feeling that, like Alice’s rabbit hole or the Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy’s “infinite improbability drive”, the digital world of the
Internet is a place of infinite possibilities and hidden depths. Interaction with it therefore results in
widely disparate outcomes. Whole
mornings or afternoons can be swallowed with little gain, great confusion, or enormous
advantage. Serendipity is multiplied by
some infinite number so that wisdom can appear to be at the beckoning of
divination. Though a disruption to my
train of thought, my search for the relationship between women and typing in
the UK has not only illuminated my own personal history, but has also deepened
my understanding of the wider context of 20th Century Women’s
History. In this case it seems ironic
that my own digits, having finally learned to do what was anathema in 1975, can
now reach out at a whim to gather the very key to understanding their place in
the universe.
That was fast. KLC
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