History and Changing Technology

This week's readings focused on how the practice of history has been changed by the continually emerging technology, especially since the 1990s. Each piece placed emphasis on computers and the internet as new methods for teaching and storing history.

Joshua Brown's piece on History and the Web examines history placed on the internet and removed from the pages (and comforts) of books. His work on the Who Built America? Website, that complimented a book of the same name, shows a lot of the strengths that the internet and digital formats have to offer public historians and teachers. The CD-ROM composed of 5,000 pages and thousands of primary sources (music, charts, articles, pictures, film, etc) shows just how ellaborate historic research can become- if historians can imagine it then programmers can design it. One interesting feature of the CD was that allowed students/historians the opportunity to examine their documents in their own order. This allows viewers to create their own narratives and analysis. Books, even with indexes, cannot do this as well. When a person reads a book they must read it in the order the author chooses for them; they may skip from chapter to chapter or topically but ultimately they are reading the sentences in the layout already chosen by the writer. The allowance of choice that technology provices is a real step forward in the democratization of historical understanding.

Daniel Cohen's pieces focused on the digitization of historical resources, particularly primary resources. Unlike other pieces which focused on the scanning of images and documents and making them available on the internet, Cohen looks at how the internet itself is an archive of webpages. Like the events of Pearl Harbor, after September 11, 2001 historians and others new that they were watching history right at that moment in time and that efforts to archive these great events must happen immediately, rather than waiting years to start. When historians began to archive Pearl Harbor they focused on media coverage, soldiers' experiences, and other memorirs. However, with September 11th the materials are just astounding. Instead of three major television networks there are 100. Firefighters and police officers experiences were saved but so too were average citizens. These citizens saved and donated their experiences via pictures and text but also via webpages and blogs. The sheer amount of materials is astounding.

Reading these articles and thinking about other materials on digital archives has resulted in a variety of complicated thoughts. The internet is a great tool and a fact of life but there is something so impermanent about it. An example of this is when searching the September 11th digital archives- you cannot go someplace and examine the materials. You can only find them on the internet. This results in a variety of limitations for historians. In traditional paper-based archives a researcher can often search the catalogue but they can also go into the folders and just sit and find materials that did not come up in the search. I experienced this personally when I started a project on the Tallahassee Garden Club. A search at the state archives yielded three folders- two were entirely pictures. The third was writings from a woman who had been a member of the garden club (which is why her work showed up in the search) but whose actual documents were about something entirely different. I ended up researching this woman and her events and leaving the club behind. I would never have found this if I had not been able to go in and handle the materials because I would not have known what to search. With digital archives (be they scanned or websites) researchers are at the mercy of the archivists who provide the search terms and key phrases. Scholars will only find what they know to search for and other things may be left out of results. Much like the class's work on the Heritage Protocol, if someone looks at our work they will only find it if they search a phrase that we thought to put in, otherwise they may never find what they are looking for. That, I think, has made the importance of what the class did weigh more heavily on me than at the start of the semester.