macdonald

This digital history thing, it works. When I first looked at the Philip Agre article, I noticed on the first page it said, “Please do not quote from this version, which may differ slightly from the version that appears in text.” Now I thought, what good is this then, if I have to go somewhere else to quote from it? Then I realized the webpage provided a link to The Network Observer, where the article originally appeared. And there it was, the original copy of the article.

The first chapter of Digital History provided an excellent overview and introduction to digital history. I was amazed at the immense potential of digital history. At the same time though, the chapter made certain to point out the numerous constraints and limitations to doing digital history. Even though, I only vaguely remember life before the internet. It is pretty amazing the progress made in less than 15 years. Obviously, the field of history has been slower to utilize new technology to expand the field and its audience. Do you think there will come a time when digital and visual history will be considered on the same intellectual level as traditional history? Or will there continue to be a distinction between “history” and “digital history?”

Philip Agre stressed the importance of knowing the goal of the media and the target audience. In the website examples that we looked at, each website had a different audience. The Smithsonian always has a large diverse audience including the general public and the scholarly community. The National Geographic website on Pearl Harbor seems to mainly target the general public. And The Valley of the Shadow website clearly is intended to be used as a research tool. Does a website’s target audience or purpose influence how credible we, as historians might see it? And if so, should that be the case?

I was really impressed by the Smithsonian’s HistoryWired website. The website is so easy to use. The numerous categories and subcategories allow the visitor to easily search and draw connections. However, thinking about it, the website is only a very small sample of many of the artifacts in the Smithsonian’s possession. Just as curators must decided which artifacts are displayed in each exhibit, for this website the Smithsonian selected a fairly large sample of their favorite artifacts not on display in the museum. Of course this website contains just a tiny fraction of the Smithsonian’s collections. Conversely, the Journal of American History points out that many history websites (especially archival sites) are too large for viewers to possibly read everything. Is one approach better than the other? Providing only selected documents on a website or trying to include as many documents on a website?