In
essence the craft of the historian has remained constant for some considerable
time. It has entailed the study of the
past through reading and research, analysis of the material under scrutiny, and
the creation of cohesive and convincing narrative and argument. For academic historians there is also the necessity
to pass on this knowledge and skill through teaching. However,
the advent of the computer and the Internet has changed the tools that are
available to the historian almost immeasurably, both in the pursuit of their
own scholarship and in their teaching practice.
The
American Historical Association’s journal “Perspectives on History” has
elicited a wide variety of commentary on the subject over the years, and the
May 2007 issue took the impact of digital history on historians as its central theme. Despite the passage of the last five years
and the significant changes that have occurred during that time span, the
articles are still relevant today and raise interesting points and questions.
A.H.A.
president, Barbara Weinstein[1] sets the scene with her column
“Doing History in the Digital Age”. One
wonders whether her habits and opinions have shifted over time and her honest
confessions raise the question of how the digital world really has impacted
historians of the early 21st Century, especially those whose own
scholarship was established long before the Internet became a player. Weinstein describes her own slow and patchy
adoption of the digital world. She indicates
that she is appreciative of the utility of the computer and Internet, yet wary
of the real benefits offered. She did indeed quickly adopt the PC as a
sophisticated writing tool, and the Internet as an accessible source for
students and a repository for historical journals such as the “Hispanic American Historical Review”, which she co-edits. She doubts, however, that the computer has
really improved writing[2] since she speculates that
less time is now spent on the drafting of a scholarly work. In contrast she notes the clear benefits that
the digital age gives to historical journal editors. In her own experience, communication between
the editing team of HAHR became much more efficient via electronic mail and the
publishing of the ten year index on-line created more space in the journal for
articles and gave the added value of search ability. She cautions, however, that with digital come
new dilemmas, such as where to host a site and how to maintain it for the long
term. She questions the decision of the
NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative to insist on digitization as part of all
grant supported projects, since declining resources may diminish scholarly
standards in the interests of publishing on the web. She also raises the significant paradox of
“free access”, since there are always costs associated with any access to
information, and she suggests that perhaps the trade presses would be the most
likely agents to create electronic resources that would be maintained for the
future.[3]. Finally Weinstein admits to a Luddite
tendency (even while she is trying to change this) with respect to her teaching
style, but readers are left in no doubt that her classes would certainly be
worth standing in line for and her parting comment that writing a history of
Brazil without visiting would be “no fun” serves to underline this.
Perhaps
an update of Weinstein’s column today would elicit more appreciation for the
wider resources that a modern PC and the Internet offers the historian author
and perhaps her own research and teaching has been influenced by the ubiquity
of the Internet to a greater degree than it had in 2007. By contrast to Weinstein, fellow contributor
Daniel J Cohen[4]
illustrates in his article, “Zotero : Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship”, that
he was well beyond the curve in appreciating and pioneering emerging tools for
academic historians plying their trade in 2007.
Zotero, which he co-directed, is an open source alternative to
commercial applications to manage bibliographic data and related search
materials. It is a good example of the
new possibilities that the digital age has opened up for historians who wish to
adopt them. Cohen makes us aware of the
vast and hidden knowledge about sources collected laboriously and individually
by historians over time, which never see the light of day. Zotero, he claims will aggregate that
invaluable data and organize it alongside citations and whole texts in a
digital environment that “enables better searching and analysis, easier
integration with the writing process (adding footnotes and bibliographies), and
more sophisticated organization.”[5] This kind of internet tool is particularly
powerful since it leverages the developments of social networking for
collaboration and sharing, and the growing use of metadata for discovering sources. Cohen predicts that this will create an "ecology of scholarship" with historians discovering and sharing sources and information about sources that "perhaps will lead to the discovery of new knoweldge."
Of course in the last resort the impact of
this and other digital research tools depends on how widely it is being
used. Perhaps the jury is still out.
Addition
Nothing better than this video can speak to the impact of the computer and the Internet on teaching:
TEDxKC Michael Wesch
TEDxKC Michael Wesch
[1] Barbara
Weinstein is professor of history at NYU
[2] This might
be a matter for debate.
[3] Five years on it is interesting to note the costly
litigation that has ensued as a result of copyright issues and ownership of
information.
[4] Daniel J
Cohen is professor of history and director of research projects at the
Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
"Doing History in the Digital Age"
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