What is Digital History?

 The most obvious answer to me would be that digital history is using the new technologies that are expanding every day in a way that helps to share history.  At least that was what I thought before I did my reading.  It turns out that there is much more to digital history than just using technology to further history as we know it.  The problem for digital history isn’t just getting the history out on the web, but the amount and quality of the history that is already out there.

Having been a college student for the past few years, I guess I have taken for granted the databases like JSTOR and ProQuest that were available to me through my library’s website.  Through these I could search to my heart’s content to find that one scholarly article I would need to prove my thesis for my research papers.  What I didn’t realize, or I guess really think about, was that these databases don’t come cheap.  There are hefty fees that libraries have to pay to allow their patrons access to these wonderful scholarly articles.  Also, the general public definitely does not have access to these resources.  I usually have to enter my school username and password at least twice before I can even gain access to the papers I need (which makes me wonder why I didn’t think about being able to access these things when I am no longer a student).

In another article on TechNewsDaily brought up a point of history in our time that I had never even considered.  Almost everyone in my generation has an online presence.  We have Facebook, Twitter, and (though we cringe at it now) MySpace pages to record our lives for our friends and ourselves.  At least that was what I had always thought I had been doing.  It turns out that, without even realizing, we are creating an almost second by second memoir of the daily life of the average person in the early 21^st century.  Historians of the future won’t be struggling to find proof to back up their theories about us, they will have too much to go through.

But then again, they may never have access to it at all.  Twitter saves every single tweet. In effect, Twitter has created a timeline of sorts that stores our reactions to world events.  The problem is that Twitter owns all of them.  It is hard for some families of deceased loved ones to gain the passwords to Facebook or email accounts, let alone some unrelated historian of the future.  With our lives so readily available for all to easily read online, could it be that the future will know very little because of companies protecting “our privacy” long after we are gone?  Sadly, we won’t know the answer to this question, but here is to hoping that we all will a historian our Facebook password so that he or she can include our life in their future work.

My sources:

Digital History by Daniel J. Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, Introduction and Chapter 1

Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians by Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily

http://www.technewsdaily.com/775-information-overload-digital-age-presents-new-problems-for-historians.html