Defining Digital History

The internet really took off in the early 1990s and in the last decade what started as a few rudimentary websites has snowballed into an ever improving piece of technology that literally brings information right to your fingertips in the comfort of your own homes.  It's really pretty amazing when you think about it.

Image courtesy of GMU

The implications of this new technology driven world are huge, especially for historians.  The word  "history" typically brings to mind crumbling buildings, dusty libraries, and gigantic tomes of texts.  Certainly those things are all necessary to (and greatly loved by) historians, but we also love our computers.  History in the digital age should bring to mind laptops, tablets, iPads, e-readers, databases, complex software programming, and yes, the internet.

This term 'digital history' might seem a bit confusing, but not if you replace the word 'digital' with the phrase 'technology driven.' So what is digital history?  It's a lot of things.  Defining 'digital history' isn't any easier than defining 'history,' and any historian worth his salt can launch into an hour long lecture about just how impossible it is to really define 'history' anyway.  So I'm going to attempt the impossible and try to tell you what digital history is.

First, digital history is technology driven.  It is, for the purposes of this article, intrinsically tied to the world wide web.  Digital history is history online, and as the title of this blog suggests, ongoing.

Of course history going digital means a slew of new problems for historians to consider.  In Digital History:  A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig try to address many of these issues. Stuart Fox of TechNewsDaily also points out some of the dilemmas historians in the digital age face.  All three authors agree that one of the biggest problems to surmount is the vastness of the internet.  Not only is there too much information for future historians to wade through, there is too much information out there to compete with.

History on the web needs to be accessible and searchable.  Newer technologies are making that more possible now, but it's still a slippery slope to go down.  Metadata, labels, and tags are increasingly important for information cataloged and/or placed on the internet.  Finding the right words to use is often difficult, but I've found sticking to the basics and staying simple are usually the best bets for searchability.  For instance, this article has the following labels:  digital history, history online, technology, metadata, tags, labels, and internet humanities.  So always label or tag historic information you put online, and test your tags by googling your internet projects using only your tags to see what comes up.  Good luck traveling the history information superhighway. I hope you enjoy learning about digital history as much as I do.