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...

      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 en...

     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 muc...

      This week, I focused on two digital history projects and brought up the main question posed by the 2017 White Paper and by Stephen Roberson and Lincoln A. Mullen, what were these two projects trying to argue?     The first project that I analyzed was Scot A. French's Notes on the Future of Virginia: The Jefferson-Short Letters, 1787-1826 . I chose to reach this article and learn about this project because my current professor is Dr. French and I thought it would be interesting to learn about some of the previous work he has done. And interesting it was. Dr. French's project frames over 4 decades of letters between Thomas Jefferson and William Short by their ideological positions as well as key events going on while the letters were written to provide important context.       One of the projects interfaces works like a New York subway map. The user is able to select a key term and the interface will morph to show the letters that pertain...

    This week's material I have struggled to completely grasp, but I believe that that is more to the testament of how complex a question "who owns black data?" is than my own inability to understand (I hope). I think it is best to begin with the definition of what "black data" is. According to Jessica Johnson, data is "... an objective and independent unit of knowledge". I think it would then be safe to assume that "black data" is objective units of knowledge that pertain to Africana/African American/Black studies (from here on I will shorthand this to just Black studies, like Kim Gallon did in her chapter).      The question of ownership of black data is hard to answer because of a few reasons. Like many authors have pointed out, historical works, than being by print/digital projects as well as archives, are inherently racialized. Jessica Johnson mentions that "... blackness is most often constructed in proximity to bondage and the ris...

        This week's readings expanded on the history of digital history. William Thomas does a great job outlining the adolescence of the field. His chapter, written in 2004, points the origin of digital history to the late 1960s and early 1970s when historians were on going through a "culture war". He explains that during these decades there was a rise in quantitative history that came about with early computers. The culture war was between the historians who believed that quantitative history was more in line with social sciences and deviated away for the "traditional" way history was done, which was narrative history. To note, Thomas does point out that quantitative history was done even in the 1940s, but he is rather emphasizing the use of technology in the 1960s and 1970s allowed for a vastly larger amount of data to be computed with more efficiency.      William Thomas emphasizes these debates between historians with the example of the 1974 ...

      Ian Milligan is a Professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is also the Associate Vice-President, Research and Oversight Analysis for UW's Office of Research. Milligan's research focuses Canadian history, particularly social movements in Canada, and Digital history, looking closely at the history of the Internet. Milligan has authored three books, one of which is the topic of discussion in this blog post, and has been a part of a plethora of other projects that revolve around digital history.     Milligan's  History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research has a few central claims and objectives. Perhaps the most pressing is that modern historians will have a vastly different source base than our predecessors. Milligan highlights the explosion of born-digital primary sources, and how these digital sources have their pros and cons. While Milligan encourages the wider use of born-digital sources and w...