Blog Post #2

            For this week’s class, we read a collection of articles that serve as a guide to digital history. Digital history and digital humanities have rather broad subjective definitions. However, as I mentioned in last week’s blog post the most widely acceptable definition of digital humanities would be “digital tools for a digital age,” this would also be the most widely acceptable definition for what is digital history. Digital history is more than this definition or any possible definition, digital history is the tools, websites, universities, museums, libraries, staff, and faculty that use digital history to catalog, apply for grants, map, and build exhibits every day. These tools are used every day of our lives, many of which have become pretty mainstream.

               Digital history since the 1970s has become more accessible to a wider audience. In the 1990s, it was easier for an even greater group of people to have access to digital history with the ability to afford personal computers. Before the 1970s, computers were often kept in a building by themselves, costed exorbitant amounts of money, were usually owned by universities or government institutions and were used to quantify data (Thomas, “Computing and the Historical Imagination”). Looking at digital history in the 1970s and before primarily shows a lack of it since it was not widely accessible to a general audience, instead it was limited to government institutions and universities to quantify data.

            We have previously talked about the similarities between digital history and digital humanities, but how do they differ? The main difference is digital history specifically focuses on history while digital humanities can focus on anything that falls under the umbrella of the humanities, including sociology, anthropology, and so on and so forth (Robertson, “The Differences between Digital Humanities and Digital History”). It is also possible to look at art in a digital history context as well as its own context on a digital platform. Both professional and budding artists post their art on websites like www.deviantart.com. This is a digital tool that artists can use to put their work out in the world but also receive feedback as well, which is very valuable and a great tool.

            As I mentioned in my previous blog post there are many pearls to digital history. We live our personal, professional, and academic lives constantly wired in to one smart device or another. We are always under constant threat of losing our lives both literally and figuratively since we live our lives online and keep all of our financial and private information on our smart devices as well. We need more face to face interaction and a little less through a screen but that’s just me. Like I said last week, we need to back up our lives like we back up our important documents. If we lost access to technology we have the potential to lose access to all archival documents that are purely stored on online databases and that is scary. However, digital history does have great promise. We have unprecedented access to information systems and technology that was not available to previous generations. We also have access to books, primary sources, articles, etc. with a click of our finger, history has never been more accessible than it is today. Digital history and digital humanities are slowly becoming more inclusive as technology advances.