What is Digital History?

Digital history is a tricky thing to define. My familiarity with the field (is it a field?) is minimal at best. The collaborative, interdisciplinary and experimental aspects of digital history projects sets them apart from traditional work in the humanities. Any definition that focuses on qualifiers may unintentionally undermine the non-traditional aspects of any given project. Lisa Spiro’s “ ‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” approached this dilemma directly and promoted a set of values that focus on communication and community rather than arguing whether projects are in the club or out. Along similar lines, I prefer a definition of digital history that is as open and inclusive as possible and have settled on this:

Digital history is the practice of using digital tools and technologies with the intentions of contributing to historical scholarship.

(The limited varieties of words that definitions of digital history typically entail lead me to believe that this definition already exists in the ether. My apologies to whomever I have plagiarized.)

Because digital history can encompass a wide variety of projects, an open definition allows a focus on the quality of a project in terms the project’s goals and intentions. Digital archives and databases may primarily be research tools, the choices from which materials get digitized to what tags documents receive involves a level of interpretive decision making. The educational website Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History may not be as design-centered, flashy, and academic as more recent projects, yet it’s content encourages the promotion of historical thinking and insight into what historians do for a school age population.

The Spatial History Project is a section of Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and uses visualizations and mapping technology to approach research questions that pertain to spatial history. The projects vary in themes, from the community based “Rebooting History” documenting urban change to the expansive information mapping of “Shaping the West.” These projects are a result of collaboration between academic researchers, primarily professors and graduate students, and the staff at the Spatial History Project. The mesmerizing visualizations undoubtedly belong within the literature of the topic they cover, as well as within the more sweeping information field in which they reside on the web.

The open source, interdisciplinary journal Southern Spaces presents history in the form of traditional articles, alongside photo essays, videos footage, and lectures, while promoting more experimental entries, such as the types of spatial histories found at the Spatial History Project. Digital history may or may not develop into its own field in twenty years, yet the practices of its proponents are making an impact on the way people process information and the distribution of scholarship.