Reaction: Creating New Understandings

The web sites for this week’s readings created opportunities to explore and experience different models of digital historical deployment.  Primary articles included “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History” and sections of “Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.”  The variety of readings for the week illustrated some basic digital tools and strategies: a book published online, a compilation of conversations, link-based navigation of book excerpts; audio interview responses to prepared questions, newspaper articles (NYTimes) with relevant inter-article linking, and a satirical, graphically themed website featuring the intrepid Boilerplate complete with an online gift shop.

The Interchange dialogue amongst digital historians, which occurred in 2008, is approaching an electronic lifetime ago.  But while the sophistication of specific tools has changed and expanded, the overarching concepts discussed at the roundtable are still relevant.  The authors brought different specialties to the dialogue and so were able to explore nooks and crannies of large topic questions.  The question of analog and digital histories and the tensions between them is a considerable divide that exists between traditional historians and those historians who are embracing contemporary technologies.  Digital history—the application of new technologies to knowledge structures and pedagogic practices—breaks with the long tradition of academe and opens new, essentially unexplored opportunities for learning, participation, and collaboration.  Cohen speaks to the power of  smart search engines as a tool to bring together dispersed and seeming disparate historical resources.  (More on this below.)  Turkel opens a conversation on ownership, availability, and cost of historical scholarship, a digital supplement to scholarly labors and time-honored long-form monograph.

An intriguing possibility of digital information and the ability to cross-pollinate from multiple sources is if the categorization of hierarchical relationships, understanding, and assumptions will change.  Under old, manual systems of classification for written materials, hierarchical definition of relationships, a definition of normative, and the creation of the Other, established artificial structures of power and presumptions of difference.  For example, both the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) created hierarchical structures of knowledge.  (Reference Hope A. Olson’s (2001) “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs.”)  The Google search engine, a construction of user search phrases and frequencies, reflects to some degree this same hierarchical structure and learned values.  Digital cataloging, unlike traditional analog cataloging, is a free for all, dependent not on formal numbering systems, but open to unlimited and visionary rethinking of how material and data can be perceived in new and original constructions.

The Digital History book available online by Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig puts the philosophy of open learning and collaborative sharing into practice.  The book, available in bound, printed form, is also available online. Published in 2005, this book might be considered ancient against the warp speed timeline of technologic advancements.  However, the introductory themes are still relevant to the novice digital historian.  Teaching and Learning, a short section, takes the reader beyond the electronically posted syllabi into larger projects, online trends, and pedagogic philosophy.

The future of digital scholarship and learning is an exponentially expanding field, moving with such rapidity that all new scholars must engage with the new tools or become, as does the material they study, become part of history.