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.