lovehistory.net

I will start my discussion of today’s readings by saying I wish they had come a bit earlier in the course sequence so that they’d fallen before we handed in our proposals. I felt there was a lot to be learned here about why digital humanities are important, and how scholars address each other when discussing this issue. I found the ACLS reading to be especially pertinent to many of our class discussions, but especially to the proposal because to me it read like one giant pitch for “cyberinfrastucture” or the importance of the new digital age/knowledge economy to humanities. It was a good a lesson in how to write such a paper, even if it did not necessarily have as focused a purpose as our proposals did. But it gave me a better idea of the language and structure that scholars use when making such a “pitch,” as it were. The article also addressed issues very relevant to my own project when it went over in fairly thorough detail the difficulties that copyright laws present when trying to build digital history projects. Because I’m building an archive that will gather resources generated in or around the 1960s and 70s, I am likely to run into copyright issues, and this article answered questions for me in a way that may allow me to be a bit more articulate about my plan in the future. The article also discussed how important building a community is for all digital humanities projects, and the repetitive manner in which the authors emphasized this point really drove it home to me in a way previous readings hadn’t quite managed.

Similarly, the report and white paper on how digital and public history is treated within academia in terms of employment and tenure revealed just how these new trends toward collaboration are redefining not only the way we do history, but are forcing us to re-think how we institutionalize it. I couldn’t help but feel, as I read through these three articles, that I was the intended audience of each of them. I say that because I am constantly being urged or forced to rethink my own conceptions of history and academic history, and I have only just barely begun to pursue it as a career.

As to the article on writing a digital history article, I was fascinated to read about the difference between writing an article specifically for a digital medium versus simply digitizing a traditional article. Most interesting was the fact that the authors had to find a balance between integrating the functions and structure of a traditional article with the new structural possibilities of a digital medium in order to make their project palatable to their peer review audience. I would have liked to have read more about how the article is being used, and perhaps even some direct feedback from those using it out in the field as a way to further evaluate the effectiveness of their project, and to investigate how far the actual use of their article might have deviated from its intended purpose or audience.