Introduction: Boons and Banes of Being a Historian in the Digital Age

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I know, I know. It's been a while since I've posted, but now! Now, I am earning a grade posting on this blog. My hope is that habits are formed; I become hooked. And as far as addictions can go, history blogging certainly is on the mild side.

I am currently taking a topics course: Digital History with Dr. Charles Evans at Northern Virginia Community College. Obviously since I have already tried to start a history blog, I was somewhat aware of what I needed to be doing to keep up with this growing part of the industry. One week in and Dr. Evans, the syllabus, and the readings have been a wealth of information. I feel like I have more information, links, articles, and projects at my finger tips than I can possibly get through in the remainder of the semester.

I just finished the "Introduction" from our course textbook, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. The introduction is a smart assessment of both the boons and banes that the web offers to historians working in the digital age.

The Boons

"Quantitative Advantages"

• capacity - We carry around libraries in our pockets! Oooh boy!
• accessibility - Our audiences can grow from Mom and Dad and friend who listens to your ramblings to much, much larger and more diverse readership.
• flexibility - The past can reveal itself with all of its many masks. An oral historian can write analysis of traditional village stories, but also share the voices of the storyteller.
• diversity - More readers, but also more writers!

"Additive or Expressive Advantages"

• manipulability - How do I get to touch, move, shape, see, represent the past differently than reading/viewing it in a textbook?
• interactivity - A relationship between the author, a text, and the reader has always been at the heart of "reading a text," but now a more concrete (concrete and occasionally less physical) relationship between the author, text, and reader appears.
• hypertextuality (or nonlinearity) - The Wikipedia Wormhole, as I call it. You're there to look up hypertext and you end up reading the page on Nietzsche. (hypertext--> metafiction--> presentational theatre--> mimesis--> Theodor W. Adorno--> Nietzsche)

The Banes

• quality - Back in the day, when I was in school, and you had to walk uphill in the snow, barefoot to get there, Wikipedia was NOT a serious place to get information. We were told only to get information from .gov and .edu pages, and then to find and use their references.
• durability - Backup your backup? And then back it up again? When it's gone from the net, it's gone.
• readability - Do you read and comprehend as well on the web? A future post will be coming on that. But that also changes the game for the writer as well! How does a writer/historian present the past in the way best to one's end game? Will your readers understand you?
• passivity - Create or consume? Comprehend?
• inaccessibility - Inaccessibility has certainly been brought into the spotlight, with the recent news of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a young man about to be tried to the hacking and distribution of JSTOR articles. Swartz and many with him, say the information should be free to the public, not controlled by a large conglomerate, charging the universities (and ultimately students, faculty, etc) for access to information that they created.

I often read science fiction stories, and my favorite examples are often apocalypse stories. I am particularly enchanted by the idea of the utopian dystopia (or the dystopian utopia, I suppose). Cohen and Rosenzweig create that same tension about the digital future, and history's place in the digital future. The disadvantages are often arguable and have their own silver linings, while every advantage can be taken advantage of.