The
introduction of the textbook starts by showing what people thought the digital
revolution would unfold. The authors
discussed views both positive and negative.
The discussion then turned to the advantages and disadvantage of digital
history. I think that this was an
important foundation for the text, because it in a way laid down the ground
rules, or principle for doing digital history.
The first chapter begins with the origins of the internet and the early pioneers
of digital history. The next section
describes early attempts to categorize history cites and describes why it is so
difficult but important. The rest of the
chapter is spent going into detail about several categories.
I
watched the interview of Anne Sarah Rubin. Both she and the writers in the
article had a positive view of digital history.
In both cases they had broad definitions of the term. Rubin says that
she thinks that digital history does the same kind of research as non-digital
history and that the real difference is in how it is presented. William Thomas in the article defines it as
using new communication technologies to examine and present history. The main difference seems to be that he
Thomas puts more focus on how digital history effects the research process. William Turkel goes a step farther to and
states that ‘digital history makes use of sources in digital form.”
I
enjoyed the Core Rules of Netiquette. I
have spent a good amount of time in various online discussion forums and have
seen many examples of these rules being broken.
I
thought the article History, Digitized (and Abridged) brought up a point that
not many people are talking about. In
the information age people are so over whelmed with the amount of information
at hand that it seems like everything known to man must be online. Because of this people don’t think about what
is being left out.
I agree with you on concentrating on the argument that it is not the act of digitizing information that we need to debate but how the information, once digitized, will be used. There are so many ways information can be utilized once it is digitized; and I think the worse use for it, and disservice, would be confining it to just websites. There are some extraordinary tools out there to enhance museums, etc.
ReplyDeleteJesse,
ReplyDeleteExcellent point in regards to many people thinking that everything out there must be online. This,of course is false,but it makes me think about all of the wonderful little bits of information we as historians are missing out on if we utilize only digital information. If we want to beat dead horses then digital history is,by itself priceless,simply because there is a plethura of stuff available about popular historical events. Not to say digital history has not increased the ability for us to find information that we otherwise would have to travel to find,it just seems that we have alot and I do mean alot of work to add to the digital world when discovering new info that we failed to discover in the first place.