Fall 2024: Digital History

     This week (or rather last week's) reading was on The Handbook of Digital Public History. It is clear after reading parts of the book that it is one of the premier text if you want to dive into digital public history. The authors provide a great overview of both public history and digital history, and how these two separate fields were wedded together with the development of newer technology. The book also outlines how digital tools and media are redefining historical research, both technically and methodologically. The book, however, is also very transparent. It also highlights the challenges that DPH faces, such as the lack of preserving long-term digital resources because of the everchanging available technology, the lack of training or adaption of some historians to use digital tools, and ethical concerns of digitizing sources ( see this article for one example of the ethical problems with that ).     The chapters I read from the book, however, highlight the historiography

      It has been a few weeks, but today I will be talking about historical geographical information systems (GIS), the Spatial Turn, and some examples of historical GIS in action. Historical GIS is a very important tool in digital history. It has allowed historians to look at data in new ways to find different patterns across different scales, both geographically and temporally.      It would be a disservice to not talk about Anne Kelly Knowles while talking about historical GIS. In 2000, Knowles wrote and article for the Social Science History journal and talked about how in the 1998 and 1999 Social Science History Association sessions were buzzing with academics excited about historical GIS. This was a new way for people across different fields to use technology in new ways to do historical research. In this article, Knowles defines historical GIS as "... a spatial database that integrates map-based information about the historical location of certain entities... with quantitat

     This week's reading of The History Manifesto read a lot like an overview of history as a discipline. One of the main points of the book is about how historians in the mid-1900s began writing long, overarching histories called "longue durée". This approach to historical writing, as Guldi and Armitage point out, are individuals that are looking back in the past to get a better understanding of what to expect in the future (26).       The "longue durée" approach was not used just by historians, but also political scientists, political activists, psychologists, biologists, etc. These people, who were not originally trained to look back into history like a historian would, had their own agendas for doing so. Some people might be looking back into the past to try and influence political policies of the present, others may be trying to find connections to make the argument of climate change strong. the main factor was that "longue durée" was as much a h