What is Digital History
The experimentation of the past decades of the emergence of
new computer technology and historical information has lead to the creation of digital
history. Digital history loosely refers to the digitizing of historical
information over communication mediums such as the internet, computer
databases, and various computer software applications. The field is driven by historians, scholars, librarians
and other cyberenthusiast need to
express facts and historical information in new multimedia computer formats. The new approaches to digital history is a paradigm shift away from the linear
methods of production and presentation (books, papers just to name a few) of historical information. As noted in Cohen and Rosenzweig ground breaking book entitled Digital History : a Guide to
Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web states that, “
…ancient discipline of history has begun
to metamorphose. In the past two
decades, new media and new technologies have challenged historian to rethink the ways that they
research, write, present, and teach about the past.”
Digital History has many beneficial facets such as users
accessibility, diversity of information and the ability to hypertext from one
source of information to the next in a nonlinear fashion. According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, accessibility
is one of the most important aspect of digital history. Ordinary people now have access to huge
databases of information, which was once regulated to the academicians. Amateur historians now have more ability to
create websites, online articles, and blogs. By
allowing amateur historians to have greater involvement in the production and
publishing of history help contributes significantly to historical information
reaching a broader audience. In addition, students and scholars have received the benefit of increase
access to large corporate data bases (like JSTOR) with the emergence of digital history.
Digital History like any other field is not without its share of
problems. For example, even through some amateur historian web publications may used the best in
multimedia design, their content may have some flaws due to their lack of
traditional historical training , research methods or poor scholarship. The field of digital history is still evolving.
The focus of rethinking new ways of presenting historical information and the
parameters of this emerging field is still unfolding. Ultimately, digital history practices and methods should
lead to a richer experience for consumers of history and the proliferation of
historical information.
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