the MAGIC of HISTORY

Patricia Cohen's article on the benefits of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to historians is undeniable. This technology can truly bring to life issues that have already been beaten to death by tradition academic means. Her example of being able to use google earth or other technologies to see what Robert E. Lee was really looking at when he made his fateful commands at Gettysburg demonstrates how this technology is not only a fun new way to show history to regular people, but also a powerful tool to develop new historical thoughts within the academic community.

Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry gives us insight into the emerging field of interactive visualization which will no doubt only become larger and larger as time goes on. Within the book Bill Ferster gives numerous examples of websites already utilizing this technology.

I was excited to see that google docs was considered by Ferster to be on the cutting edge of digital history as it is something that I've used for over a year for academic work. It allows you to not only upload your own files, such as word documents and power points (and even videos) but it also allows you to create google's own version of word documents, excel spreadsheets and all sorts of other things. The amazing thing about google docs though is that it allows your information to be accessible AND editable by other individuals that you have allowed into a group. You can literally open a document for a group project and see the text appear as someone is writing into it. For collaborative purposes in regards to historians this could be a very powerful tool.

Google Ngram (google is killing it with all these tools) allows a user to see how often a term is used over time. This is a pretty neat tool and can help a historian see patterns and how popular certain ideas were at times. Although I question how accurate this tool is currently, according to it, the term Jewish was only used in books during the 1810's and the 1830's. Furthermore since this website only is giving you the raw numbers presented in this graph without any context (exactly what books are these?) it is hard to truly ascertain what these trends mean since the use of the term may be different in some of these works than what we expect the term to mean in our own minds.

Edward Ayers and Will Thomas created the Virginia Center for Digital History in 1998 and it has been an influential development for digital history. The driving force behind the VCDH was The Valley of the Shadow project which was an award winning website (although I was dismayed to see that it looks like something I made in my 7th grade HTML class). Elsa and Justin Nystrom got a chance to sit down and talk with Will Thomas about the VCDH.

This article (which is basically a QA with Will Thomas that they took out of that format to make it more academic looking and less helpful) brings up two extremely important issues in the digital history field. The first is how much are historians really embracing the new medium? and secondly, are many works in digital history getting the credit they need to grow? These questions actually made me seriously reconsider what I thought about digital history.

As Thomas notes, very few historians are actually harnessing the power of digital media in any of their scholarly articles. There is no special hyper links or features that one can easily see research or citations when they scroll their mouse over a sentence or anything like that. In many ways, the digitization of all this work has become a convenient way to share information and save paper, which is fantastic and a huge improvement for the field, but there is still so much more than can be done. Basically, there is a limitless amount of things that a historian can utilize this electronic medium for to change enhance their final product but because of traditional restraints on what a historical work must be (simple text, maybe some pictures, and your references at the end), the development of any interesting additions is being held back.

The other interesting thing brought up in this article is the challenge recognition. Unless it truly gains a huge amount of attention and is giving awards, spending years on a website is a fairly not beneficial career move for a historian. There is no standard for judging and endorsing online scholarship in the way that there is for articles (peer reviewing journals). Ultimately, historians are doing a job and they want to be recognized for their work and move ahead in their careers, and at this time it is difficult to advance in such an unorthodox way.

So, at first glance, there are history websites out there, people are putting their academic journals online, maybe some forward thinking people have twitter accounts, digital history is being accepted. But is it really being accepted? Historians that find the most success are not creating website projects, their articles are still just regular text which could have simply been written on paper in the first place, so how much are historians really embracing digital history? Of course this article is a few years dated and things are progressing but I think these two key issues still remain.

For over a century the profession of history has changed very little. It has been individuals searching through old documents in an attempt to report on history as it actually happened. This search involved traveling (sometimes far distances across the globe) in order to find these documents (mind you the original documents) and then the historian would write their book which people could purchase or find at libraries.

In the last two decades the technological revolution and profoundly changed how historians can go about their job. No longer must a man travel so far and wide to gain knowledge, as much of these documents are being digitized and put on high speed networks which can be accessed anywhere, much as John Browning said would happen. Although many people have embraced much of these new technologies, it is true that barely anyone has fully embraced all the new technologies available to them.

In The Pasts and Futures of Digital History by Ayers ( http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html ) we see an article from 199 which is correctly seeing into the future of history. He talks about the early success of H-net which is growing more and more popular and useful even now over a decade after this article was written. He champions the possibilities that new digital media can bring to not only historians but historians connections to other professionals such as secondary school teachers.

#his6938

The notion of historians using Twitter seems almost laughable at first glance, but if the goal of the historian is to be in constantly updated with the newest developments of his colleagues and stay up to date with technology then Twitter is perfect. Twitter allows individuals to share thoughts incredibly fast (especially if they have a smart phone) with the rest of the world and it allows us to stay somewhat connected to individuals whom we share common interests.

Elizabeth Grant's article ( http://blog.historians.org/resources/1393/five-ways-for-historians-to-use-twitter ) points out the very real and practical benefits of a twitter account. Access to resources, organizations, conferences, and jobs can clearly be enhanced by having a twitter (if those resources, organizations, conferences, and jobs also have twitter).