A Digital Dark Age?

     This weeks readings focus a lot on the potential digital apocalypse. What would happen if tomorrow the world's technology ceased to work? I always hear people talk about how books are becoming obsolete in the digital age. In reality, paper and other analog records have lasted so long, because they are reliable (even if there are periods where paper has disintegrated). But since we live in a digital world, there are records that are purely digital. If we want to preserve the information of the current age, we must recognize the fragility of digital records today. In a 2008 article in Science Daily (found here), explains that “with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility”. The problem with digital information is that it is subject not only to deletion, but with the rapid changes in software and technology, digital data can become incompatible or end up corrupted as time goes on. In the four years since the article was written, we have continued to see a heavier reliance on our digital tools, and thus we are continually locked in with companies that don't like their products being used on devices they don't make a profit on. The key to maintaining digital information’s relevancy and accessibility in the future according to the article is to focus on open source and adaptive software formatting.
    

According to Wikipedia, digital preservation (found here) can be described as “managed activities” focused on “continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary”. Preservation programs require massive amounts of sustained funding, which means that very few groups have the capacity to preserve digital information that will hold up to the test of the apocalyptic digital “dark age”. Not only do digital preservationists need to consider software and deletion problems, they also have to recognize the ethical and professional dilemmas one can face in the field. Questions about relevancy, authenticity, and accessibility can plague any good preservationist, but groups such as the University of British Columbia have sought through their InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) to develop methods for best practices, standards, and policies that can protect digital information and ensure accuracy and reliability for years to come.

NBC's drama, Revolution, plays on the idea that our tech-reliant world will face a digital "dark age" in the near future.

     While the Science Daily article is good at exploring the potential pitfalls of digitizing and archiving information, the author argues that organizations, universities, and governments are wasting money by investing heavily in digitization of information, because if we enter a digital “dark age” all of the money spent will be lost. Personally, I doubt we will hit a digital “dark age”  any time soon (NBC's Revolution anyone?), and the benefits of digitizing for public access alone seems to be a great reason to continue investing in digital preservation. Since we live in a digital world, we should continue investing in digital archival and preservation of both purely digital and digitized analog documents.
     Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel's article on the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection (article found here, collection found here) explains that  by digitizing documents they were able to “preserve the originals by reducing handling [and] facilitate access”. The online collection was designed with the visitor in mind. Not only does the site offer a digital “book-bag”  to store documents for later viewing, they also use a sort of visitor tracking, so they can alert other visitors of pages related to their views. The group behind the project, FANG (Finding Aids Next Generation), sought to “identify those features and functions that enhance the usability of finding aid, create common ground, and provide 'social affordances' that encourage interaction, such as the participation of users to help one another”. The project particularly focused on social interaction as a way to help users find information relevant to them within the archive. When the site launched in 2006, the group sought to survey users to find out how the site worked for them. Since many of the users had personal family connections to the Polar bear Expedition, things like bookmarking or the comment feature meant they could have a personalized sense of access to the archives, making research easier and more user friendly.
     Personally, after reading Krause and Yakel's article, I was made aware of the impact of accessibility in digital archives. By continuing to expand digital collections and employing digital preservation methods,  historians are opening up access to public while potentially saving original documents from handling damage. While we could find ourselves stranded in a world with out technology in the future, digital preservation is important today because of the accessibility it gives ordinary people. Plus I don't think we should be destroying original documents after we digitize them. I like to think of digital archives as a back up source, that not only protects but provides access to documents.

Spokane Historical Stops: Fox Theater

Fox Theater;

Address: 1001 W. Sprague Avenue

Year Built: 1930

Located on the corner of Sprague and Monroe in downtown Spokane, the Fox Theater has been an icon for entertainment in Spokane. Built in 1930, by Fox West Coast Studios, the stark concrete modernistic architecture of the theater,designed by Robert C. Reamer, stuck out like a sore thumb. The Spokesman Review in an article dated September 3, 1931 referred to the building as "so unusual, so bizarre and so futuristic... certainly Spokane has seen nothing like it before". Fortunately for Spokane, the interior proved to be much richer, filled with art-deco detailing from top to bottom designed by Anthony Heinsbergen, most famous for his work in the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California. The Fox was the first motion picture theater built by a major motion picture company in Spokane. The theater featured many of Fox's studio films as wells as guest appearances by directors themselves, such as George Arliss in 1933. During WWII, the iconic Fox sign towering above the building went dark from 1942-1957. As more movie theaters began to pop up in the city, the Fox Theater began to decline in popularity, and it's old age began to show such as in 1978 when the theater full of school boys had to be evacuated due to smoke caused by faulty wiring. In 2001 the theater was added to the Spokane Historic Register, and underwent a huge restoration. In 2007, the Fox Theater reopened its doors as the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, and is now the home of the Spokane Symphony.

For more information on the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox and for information on events held there, please visit their website: http://www.foxtheaterspokane.org/

Spokane Historical Stops: Hutton Settlement (revised)

The Hutton Settlement

Location: 9907 E Wellesley
Date Built: 1917-1918


Life as an orphan out on the western frontier was full of hardships. Without parents, siblings were separated and bounced around from distant relative to distant relative. It was a lonely life for most orphans, who were often treated like servants in the homes they occupied. According to Levi Hutton, life with his uncle was so unbearable he ran away to fight Indians at age 15, only to return on account of his empty stomach. But by 18, he had headed out west to make it on his own. In 1887, Levi married fellow orphan May Arkwright, and moved to Wallace, Idaho seeking fortune. After investing all they owned in Wallace's Hercules mine, the Huttons were made millionaires in 1901.

Though the couple's lives were changed by wealth, they never forgot their orphaned pasts. The two constantly sought to improve the lives of the abandoned and orphaned in Spokane. Having moved to Spokane in 1907, the Huttons were actively involved in charity organizations within the community. The two were very involved at the Florence Crittenton Home which housed unwed mothers and their children, and often took groups of orphans to the circus and other events. Having no children themselves, the Huttons even provided a loving home for several children under their temporary care.

After May Hutton's death in 1915, Levi Hutton, who often recalled the hardships of his childhood, began planning a home for children who have been abandoned, orphaned, or abused. This home, according to Hutton would provide a loving home that fostered self-reliance and confidence in the children it housed. In 1917, Levi Hutton had established the Hutton Settlement on over 300 acres of land. The settlement was designed to provide a “Happy Home” for children while teaching them skills through working on the farms located on the site. The Settlement is privately funded through a carefully organized trust funded by the Hutton fortune, and was intended to be self-sufficient by using the crops grown on the property for food. In addition to the 9 buildings on the site, there is a barn, vegetable garden, and land for farming.

Upon his death, Levi Hutton secured the future of the Hutton Settlement by giving almost all of the Hutton fortune to to the project. While Levi Hutton felt bequeathing his and his wife's fortune to the home was the right thing to do, other family members contested his decision. Allegations of fraud and mismanagement have never seemed to deter the goal of Levi Hutton and his home for children. To this day the Hutton Settlement continues Levi Hutton's vision of providing a home for children. It continues to focus on providing a home and family for those who have none. The Settlement's continued commitment to the well-being of children is a standing testament to the Huttons and will continue to be for years to come.

For more information on the Hutton Settlement please visit their website: http://www.huttonsettlement.org/

Sources:

Arskey, Laura. “In No Uncertain Terms: From the Writings of May Arkwright Hutton.” Pacific Northwesterner , Westerner, Spokane Corral 52, no. 1 (April 2008).

Pratt, Grace Roffey. “The Great-Hearted Huttons of the Coeur d'Alenes.” Montana: a Magazine of Western History 17, no. 2 (April 1967): 20-32.

Ellensburg Daily Record. “Hutton Settlement the Realization of a Resolution Made By an Orphan Boy.” February 23, 1920.

Spokane's First National Bank. Levi Hutton Builder of a Dream. 1974.

Spokesman Review. “Demand Estate of Mrs. Hutton.” January 7, 1919.

Spokesman Review. “L.W.Hutton Dies; Spokane Mourns.” January 4, 1928

Spokesman Review. “Orphanage Deed Filed By Hutton.” February 2, 1920

Copyright and the Public Good

Copyright laws are about as confusing as the federal tax code. The original 1790 law only really refers to maps, charts, and books, but since the emergence of film, photography, television, mass consumerism, and the internet, the laws on copyright have become more complicated. The internet was created as a sort of ultimate open access tool-- millions of websites, programs, and tech advances have been born on the internet. The fundamental issue underlying copyright laws is the balance of encouraging intellectual invention, ingenuity, and scholarship while maintaining free access to information so that others can learn, use, benefit, and even expand or add to the intellectual conversation. The question that has plagued businesses, and creators is what is considered their intellectual property, how long it is protected under copyright, and what legal ramifications should come from copyright infringement online. 

     Cohen explains this in his chapter on digital copyright (found here),"those who create historical materials on the web are, indeed, likely to find themselves on both sides of the legal and ethical fence—creating intellectual property that they want to “protect” and “using” the intellectual property of others". The challenge to creating digital scholarship is the dual nature of the internet: open-access but clinging to capitalist ideals. A great example of this is Google Books: what started out as a project scanning millions of books from local libraries and uploading them to a sort of online library, quickly morphed into a privatized project plagued with copyright lawsuits not only from publishers but authors and artists as well. It is funny because while libraries cause little stir in the copyright realm, Google Books which essentially was attempting to do the same thing (only online) dealt with multi-million dollar lawsuits on copyright infringement, but while I would like to consider libraries and Google Books the same, I know that one is a government funded program and the other is a private company which makes all the difference in the world. 

The publishing organization, Creative Commons is dedicated to providing information for the common good, while protecting the copyrights of the creator. This image was provided free for download on their website (found here).

     I could go on voicing my disappointment in Google Books, I should say that there are other projects that have sought to create a open access collection of works that seek to limit the looming copyright rain cloud from the heads of those who are seeking to use materials found on the site for intellectual creativity and education. The Creative Commons (found here) is essentially a publishing company that creates copyright licenses for individuals who want their research, works and projects to be open to the public. Simply speaking the company's vision "is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity" (found in their "About" section here). The beauty of this company is its recognition to the original intention of the copyright law. While it is important to recognize the work established by others, it is also incredibly important that we have the ability and freedom to expand and adapt works to make further advancements. Creative Commons recognizes the power of the intellectual community and broadens the scope of readership to those who might not be able to afford expensive subscriptions to academic publications where many of the advances in academic fields are being discussed. 

While Disney still holds the copyrights to this charming mouse, I was still able to find this picture on Google Images and post it online without asking for permission from Disney. The open-access nature of the internet makes it all too easy to find and republish intellectual property. (The image can be from from a blog post here)

     Maybe it is the poor grad-student in me, or maybe it is my experiences living abroad, but I just don't buy into the idea that my historical works are mine and should be tested or challenged or added to. Having taken a bit of Macro-economics, I know that there is a difference between what is considered private property and what is considered a public good. A public good is something that fills a public need. Street lamps, garbage collection, public schools, and libraries are all public goods. Intellectual property as defined in the that 1790 law, gives rights to the author for a limited period, and then turns it over to the public so that others can build off of the work. The problem is that congress has the ability to change the time frames for how long an item can be held under copyright. Mark Helprin's 2007 New York Times op-ed piece (found here) argues that companies like Disney should have the right to keep their intellectual property from the public, despite the fact that the company has been around for over half a decade. Helprin explains, "No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy". In his mind, since the ways of the world are now driven by ideas rather than the hard work of agrarian labor (as it was in 1790), congress should change the copyright laws to better suit the needs of "big idea" corporations. 

     I disagree. As soon as you start to claim intellectual property on ideas and hold copyrights on those ideas for 70+ years, advancement is stinted. As a historian, unlike corporations, I am ethically obligated to share my work to the public and hope that it is used, explored, expanded upon, and challenged by other  historians as it creates a better, broader, and more accurate picture of the historical world. Historical research is a dialogue between the historian, the information, and the community.

A citizen's responsibility to history

One lesson I'll never forget from my undergraduate capstone and senior seminar is that historians have a responsibility to preserve the truths of the past. Much in the same way a good citizen of a nation has the responsibility to participate in government (through voting, referendums, and initiatives), a good citizen of history participates in the historical community by upholding their responsibility to promote the truths of the past. One way historians participate as citizens is to gather information about the present to give insight to future generations about our past. Daniel Cohen explains in a chapter about collecting digital history in his online book, Digital History (found here), "historians will need to find ways to capture such documents, messages, images, audio, and video before they are deleted if our descendants are to understand the way we lived". If we are to preserve the history of our present, the historical community as a whole must recognize the historical impact of the digital world on our lives today. It is irresponsible to ignore the digital world when collecting and preserving digital forms of history, but it is also a challenge when issues of quality and questions of relevancy surround much of what we find online.  

The Utah Digital Newspaper Project is one of many attempts to digitize information of the past and present to preserve history for future generations

     Because of technology's ever-changing and constantly improving nature, it can be a challenge to preserve some forms of digital documents. For instance, website codes need to constantly tweaked in order to remain accessible, making the preservation of webpages as they were 5 years earlier impossible. And what happens if one forgets to back up files and the originals get corrupted? Having my own computer wiped and all my Microsoft Word files corrupted by a particularly nasty virus, it is frustrating knowing that when a file is corrupted, unless you have a back up, it is lost forever. As Herbert and Estlund explain (here), the Utah Digital Newspaper found that people feared a reliance on "digital images as a preservation means" because they assumed the program would "destroy the originals". But Cohen argues (here) that historians should focus on "sticking to fundamentally sound operating principles in the construction and storage of the digital materials to be preserved is more important than searching for the elusive digital equivalent of acid-free paper". While I believe that part of the responsibility of a historian is to provide ways for people to easily access historical information, I also believe that the preservation of physical documents is just as important as it's digital counterpart. 

     There are hundreds if not thousands of projects dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting history on a digital format, but that does not mean that they are destroying the original sources. The Library of Congress (LOC) has an extensive archive of documents, many of which still have not be copied in a digital format. One of the LOC's attempts to provide digitized forms of historical information is through their myLOC program (found here). After registering for an account, users of myLOC can explore 104 online exhibits (including some that correlated to exhibits that you can no longer see when visiting the LOC today), participate in several online activities including finding secret messages in a virtual Thomas Jefferson Building, save teaching resources, plan for a physical trip to the library, and even save the information you find in a collection folder tied to your user account. While myLoc provides access to information through several collections, it still has much more information housed at the actual library that is unavailable online, and some of what is available online poses copy write issues. 

     In 2008, the Library of Congress announced it would launch a project that would allow the public to contribute to the historical conversation by uploading images on Flickr through a page known as The Commons (found here). For those of you that are unfamiliar with Flickr, it is a Yahoo owned photo sharing website, where people upload their own photos into online albums where they can be viewed by all who look. The Commons project has two main objectives (as outlined on the website):

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

This project is controversial for some, not only due to copy write and questions of ownership as mentioned on Spellbound Blog's review of the project (found here), but also because it gives the public the opportunity to add layers of metadata to the image so that those who view an image may learn all sorts of information relevant to the picture that has been added by other users. The problem with this type of crowd sourcing, is that most don't add relevant information to the picture, instead they offer up personal opinions. As many of us know through first hand experience, the internet lends itself to creating an environment that encourages self-expression, often without regard for others or the digital document itself. While some images in the project have benefited from crowd sourced metadata, it is hard to find as one must sift through layers of irrelevant junk to find "crowd sourcing gold" as Cebula phrased it (here). 

An example of the many layers of metadata one may have to sift through on the Library of Congress' Flickr based crowd sourcing  project. 

    While I am all for public participation in history, sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone is an academic historian, and while some may find the information interesting, many will not have much to contribute to the actual historical discussion. By opening up historical information to crowd sourcing on popular sites like Flickr, we are not effectively presenting historical truths to society. If one has to sift through 40 comments about a woman's hairstyle or attractive looks on a 1920's photograph, only to find a single comment relevant to the historical conversation, is that really good history? If historians are dedicated to presenting the truths of the past, does it make the partners of the The Commons bad citizens of history when historical truths are drowning in irrelevant information? 

Are webpages and Google the only ways to find digital history?

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges faced by digital historians today is the challenge to create a website that is easy to use, easy to find, easy to access, cost effective, and appeals to audiences.  Say you are a college graduate student and are looking to create a website on Pacific Northwest History. First, you’ll need to create a web page. While there are some free basic templates out there such as Wix, often if you want your own domain name, you’ll need to pay for the domain services. Daniel Cohen explains that “the pull of commercial designers has been strong across the web. Few books discuss academic web design, as opposed to commercial web design” (found here). 

Web page design templates like the free ones offered at Wix (found here) can help students with research projects they want to present inexpensively on the web. 

     One of the major problems with free access to web based academic history is the cost factor. Unless your website is being viewed and used, it isn’t really worth funding. Finding and maintaining an audience, is often forgotten by those discussing how the digital world can be used for history according to Cohen (found here). Since the internet is still relatively new in the ways we are using it, a major struggle will be coming up with solutions to keep an audience. Because marketing is not seen so positively in the academic world, it is difficult to come up with solutions to web-based scholarly work.

     Don't get me wrong, there are databases for cataloging digital academic work, like the one found at Art-Humanites.net  (found here). For most people, if they are trying to find something online, they turn to Google. Instead of falling into the commercial trap of search engine advertising, Cohen believes that historians should learn the fundamentals of Google ourselves. I tend to agree.

The power of Google searches is often underutilized by its users. 

     While Google has a lot of power over determining the audience that arrives at your site, Google also shapes the ways we find other sites on the web. According to Josh Catone, three in four college students ineffectively use Google search. His entertaining and informative iconographics on how to use Google (found here) show the range and flexibility Google searches can have (as opposed to being chained to the first page of answers on a search bar question). Additionally, Google does not just offer searches on web content, but also on digitally scanned books (found in Google Books) and digitally scanned news papers (found in Google News), as well as a plethora of academic journals and articles (found in Google Scholar). The problem with some of these new digital sources is copywrite law. Google books has been in a legal battle for almost a decade with authors and publishers over the rights to their books.

Smart phone applications are a new way digital history can reach audiences.

     While it is okay for libraries to lend out books to the public, Google (which initially wanted to do something similar) has been reduced to operating in the private sector for profit frame of mind. Other countries like France are spending billions to open up book access on the web (found on Cohen’s blog, here). There are other sources of digital history that don’t rely on Google too. Exploring Curatescape has shown me that thinking outside the webpage box can open up a world of new possibilities in digital history.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Curatescape project, it is an app based project that uses people’s natural inquisitive nature to create a self-guided tour of the historical sites in a city. Currently, there are Curatescape projects in Cleveland, Spokane, and New Orleans (found here, here and here). The beauty of this kind of project is that it is mobile. It is designed for an even larger emerging market—smart phones. And while we may still rely on Google to find that elusive chicken curry recipe or where the nearest Target store is, there may be other tools out there to explore the growing world of digital history.

Since taxpayers pay for it, perhaps we should open up access...

With the growth of the internet (and the subsequent privatization issues such as FERPA) the issue of open access is on the minds of many in the digital history community. 

     Digital historians are often greeted with new and exciting ways of presenting and researching history, but the question always remains: who should benefit from our digitized world? As Lisa Spiro said in a 2008 article on communication and open access in digital humanities (found here), “open access, just like dark and blueberries, is good and good for you”. She argues that opening up scholarly research in the humanities leads to more information accessed by more people, and encourages the exchange of ideas and collaboration with other scholars. Spiro like many other academics in humanities notes that while economic and scientific communities have greatly benefited from open access materials, the humanities has yet to really latch on to the possibilities digitizing and open access can bring. Dan Cohen, a pioneer in the field of digital history, notes in an entry on his blog (found here) the resistance some in the professional historical community have to open access forms of historical research. The American Historical Association (AHA) claims that open access works better in scientific and economic publishing, not humanities because of the nature of scholarly publishing in the field. Cohen argues that the AHA has a conflict of interest with the issue of open access, while it is mandated by congress to circulate history, it is also an association that publishes scholarly research and represents scholastic authors of history. There has been a “collective failure” on the part of historians who cling to the old ways of research (which is often funded through grants, endowments and tax cuts). According to Cohen, “we haven't tried very hard” to find a sustainable way of adapting to a democratized digital world.

This 19th century slave cage sits outside the American Historical Association building in Washington D.C.. Perhaps for the purposes of this article, we can use it as a metaphor: the cage is the box in which traditional historians have placed digital history. Instead of exploring the ever expanding and evolving digital world, historians like to follow the old methods and look at digital history as a quaint commodity that will never fit in a practical academic world. 

     While some groups like the AHA resist the opening up of scholarly research to the public, others have sought out new ways history can be presented freely to the public. Purely digital open access scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Digital Humanities (found here), provide scholars with new ways of presenting their research using digital tools. For instance, Daniel Booker's article, “Visualizing San Francisco Bay's Forgotten Past” was able to use high quality images to support his analysis of the use of the San Francisco Bay since the gold rushes of the mid 19th century. Lisa Spiro argued in 2008 that digital forms of publication can offer things like publishing photographic sources that traditional publishing methods can't or are unwilling to do. Scholars like Bill Turkel argue that history should be interactive and tangible, as it uses “people's natural way of comprehending the world through touch and other forms of sensory perception” (found in Spiro's article here). In other words, scholars should actively engage their audience instead of bogging them down with dry, and somewhat archaic, academic articles.

A pioneer in digital history, Roy Rosenzweig believed in open access of academic research. In his eyes, almost all historical research was underwritten by taxpayers, and should be made available to them. 

    University based centers are looking for new ways to research and present in digital forms, such as the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities based at the University of Maryland (found here), which provides access to current projects by students and faculty, as well as providing a blog, podcasts and hosting events that facilitate discussion on relevant issues for digital humanities. The Center for History and Media at George Mason University, is an excellent example of the strides historians can make using a digital platform. Founded by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994, the center has sought to create a variety of online digital projects aimed at educating and providing sources and tools for high school, and university students and educators. Not only does the center focus on providing tools for a “new generation” of scholars, librarians, archivists and museum curators, it has pioneer the ways we capture and preserve history made digitally. It's starring example is the center's September 11 Digital Archive (found here) which is made up of some 150,000 digital items like Black Berry Messages, video clips, emails, voice mails, and so on.

     While some historians will continue to resist the emerging field of digital history, the potential ways in which opening up history to the modern world are invaluable in teaching history to the next generation. The field is still developing, but it has come a long way in the past decade and will continue to expand, opening up new potential ways to share history and excite people in the process. While we still need to consider sustainable ways to  support the publishing of open access research, perhaps opening up historical research will inspire more creativity and new ways to think about the past.

The world of digital history and how it can help solve the puzzle

History is like a puzzle with many missing pieces. Perhaps with digital history we can find some of the pieces.

A professor once said to me  how the study of history is like putting together a very large puzzle with missing pieces, some lost forever. Historical information that can be found digitally, known as digital history, can help us find some of the missing pieces. As Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzwieg explain in the introduction to their book, Digital History (found online here), by digitizing history we have the potential to change the ways we “research, write, present and teach about the past”. Abby Smith Rumsey explains in an interview (found here) that with the wave of digital history, we are better able to capture and interpret present history in the making. For those willing to embrace the digital realities of our present world, they will find spectacular new ways of seeing, exploring and sharing history.

William G. Thomas (found here) believes that digital history has “the capacity for play, manipulation, participation, and investigation by the reader”. Online, those that want to explore a subject in history can immerse themselves with all sorts of information that would not have been so readily available. Since digital archives require little space and have the potential to open up access to the same sources from anywhere in the world. 

The British Museum not only opens its doors to the public in  London but has a  growing collection of online exhibits for those who want to learn but don't want the travel expenses. 

The “democratization” of history seems to be a running theme in the digital history community. Online copies of primary sources, article databases, museum collection databases have opened up the world of historical research to a global audience—not just scholars, curators, and researchers. The internet provides new ways of learning history: not only are more written sources readily available, but images, audio recordings, compiled historical data and other historians with the research they are working on. As outlined in a New York Times article (found here), digital forms of history can provide a new, more enhanced environment for learning, exploring, and presenting history to a globalized world.

Internet based sources of information such as Wikipedia play to the democratization of history. The danger with sites like Wikipedia is the lack of scholarly review and the potential it has to perpetuate misinformation.

While digital archives have advantages: less space needed, more storage capacity, better access, easier to organize, there are disadvantages.  Because historical resources are more readily available, Daniel Cohen predicts that “historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity” in the future. The risk of more information (and misinformation) available with less oversight can hinder the ways we learn history. The digital age has replaced our reliance on physical objects, this can make objects obsolete and can limit the ways in which we choose to study history. Katie Hafner (found here) points out how museums and archives are only digitizing a portion of their collections, and as we rely more heavily on digital sources, we forget the vast wealth of information that is not digitized. Since information online will only continue to grow as we digitize more of our history, historians will need to find ways to root out the trivial from the substantial while still incorporating what has yet been made available online. 

After this week’s readings, I am of the opinion that digital history is a wonderful tool for the future of historical research and education. But as our world is still adapting to the digital age, history and the ways we study and share it are changing too. The internet, computers, and convenient one-box searches (as Cohen put it) are all a reality in our world. We cannot ignore the impact of technology in history, but we shouldn’t replace the other ways we study and teach history. Instead, we should incorporate a bit of both. That way we only add to the puzzle and not take away.