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.