Reading Reaction no.1

    The concept of digital history has been tricky for me to explain to people who ask, considering it hasn’t been on the general public’s radar for very long. One of the later readings assigned this week from the New York Times captured it in a way that put it into some context, stating that it’s best understood as a part of an “Umbrella term covering a wide range of activities, from online preservation and digital mapping to data mining and the use of geographic information systems.” 

    One of the major concerns with digital history seems to be coming from within the historian community. There are those still resisting a transition to digitizing collections and simply opposed to the ideas of having history on anything other than the pages of a book, or behind glass at a museum. As another assigned article points out, The National Steinbeck Center, containing large amounts of artifacts from John Steinbeck’s life, is one of these unfortunate cases with no intention of digitizing their collections. To this the author warns, “Items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory.” 

        There certainly is a real danger historians face in not getting on board with the movement to digital. Not only the possibility of disappearing from the public’s memory, but the missed opportunity to advance a field to a more streamlined way of operating, where historians can easily interact and share with other historians and other professionals in the humanities. It seems rather ironic that the way of doing history, the research and even the publishing methods to an extent, have become somewhat outdated, in a way, it has become a relic.

Thanks, and see you soon.