Digital History was initially a way to present public history in a digital way, especially with the addition of hyperlinking as a way to share information quickly and easily! Most people in the digital history departments are committed to making the information accessible to a wide variety of people which is not something that can be said for other disciplines. Cameron Blevins felt very strongly in his article that historians ought to start generating new ideas about the past and how to implement them and their arguments rather than just discussing it endlessly.
Sheila Brennan stressed the importance of making sure that with whatever digital history projecting that you’re creating, that it is accessible to the “public” since they are your primary audience. With this, they always need to be put first and be the top priority.
With the increase in technological capabilities, more and more historians are able to put information online which is increasingly the first place that students will go to search for information on a topic. Something that wasn’t a problem previously, is deciphering whether or not a source is considered to be scholarly or not. Prior to the mass digitization of sources, this was a much easier thing to be aware of. Now, given that so many things are online, scholarly or not, people, students especially, have to be more intentional about the sources that they are researching. Additionally, locations of sources can change more easily on the web whether that be URLs, collections, etc. which was not the case with print sources.
Because digital history is an ever growing and changing field, scholars and groups like the American Historical Association are working to make more primary resources available to people, in accessible online formats.
Overall, historians and students alike are having to change the ways in which they think about access to historical documents and information to make them accessible to the public.
Although we have discussed this in class before, these readings also reiterated the idea of more widely available access and publication means that historians (or just students) have to learn to wade through the good and the bad. Something that stuck with me in some of the articles that I read were that the bad sources didn’t have to be all bad. Take Wikipedia for example. Most college professors would question your sanity if you only used Wiki citations on a paper, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from it. There were a couple professors who discussed using Wikipedia not as a source of citable information, but as a learning tool. One used it as a way to demonstrate how history can be created (via anonymous internet users) while another used it to teach students about different types of sources. She had a lesson that had students look at what Wikipedia is, an open encyclopedia, and what its uses could be. While things may not be perfect, the bad is not necessarily all bad.