The Virtual Past

To some extent, much of what was said in this week’s reading expands upon previous class discussions. After reading various articles and browsing the Journal of the Association of History and Computing, I have to say that the impact of the internet on the digital world is one of gradual progression.

Yes, the internet is possibly the new automobile impacting travel, communication, human interaction and the preservation of the past, but it is still perhaps constantly tested medium. Right now there seems to be no limit to what one can do on the internet (except obviously physically interacting with other human beings). At the same time though there are simple, day-to-day problems that effect scholarship in a very real way: eye-strain, accuracy, access and publication. Only through consistent innovation and invention can newer, better ways of presenting scholarship be developed….

Each of these problems also exist in the real world—(how many books does a historian have to read before they find their niche?) How many times has a document been picked up only to be disproved as a forgery or a biased viewpoint at a later date? And access to materials outside of libraries is often controlled by an academic hierarchy of networking. Though most libraries have free access…. Lastly there’s publication which though peer-reviewed is a testament to the rigors of academic life. As they say…Publish or Perish.

So what are the benefits of New Media and Scholarship?

1. David Bell’s anecdotal introduction shows that at the very least New Media saves time, allowing historians to focus on other parts of the research project.
2. Dynamic presentation options. Especially in terms of visual and material culture, the digital realm offers a variety of means in which to display and identify objects and images—allowing direct interaction between the historian, reader and the past.
3. I found the suggestion by Benjamin Hermalin to be particularly fascinating. In order to speed up the peer-review/publish process use digital media to submit to a “family” of journals which would place the article, once accepted into the best fit—saving the author time and effort.
4. Presenting information in a global market. Digital media allows at a low cost, for journals to replicate their content into a variety of languages

I am not a fan of the e-book. I agree with Bell, reading an e-book is fine for literature or fiction where the story drives the narration. In terms of scholarship, e-books stifle and make it hard to concentrate on the argument when it is fed piecemeal through a limited web browser. I suppose my questions for this week rest on what this course has been about all along: i.e. translation. How can we translate our real-world practice of history into the digital realm, how can we take what works and not lose sight of the complex process that doing history devises? I say coherency matters, and that whatever media is with maximum clarity…otherwise new ideas and information may be threathened to languish in obscurity.

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