Digitalizing History: Research and Exploration of History in a Evolving Field

 Week 6: "Arguing" with Digital History Guidelines for Digital History? The realm of digital history has evolved abundantly over the past two decades with the creation and evolution of the internet. Sources, as we have discussed, are available in an abundance that we have never seen before. Globalization is finding it's place in the realms of history, meaning new issues take place in the digitization and publication of works and authors.  To best understand and combat potential issues, The American Historical Association created a committee to examine not only “work that can be seen as analogous to print scholarship that is reviewable by peers (i.e. journal articles and books), but also to address the myriad uses of digital technology for research, teaching, pedagogy, and even some that might be described as service” (AHA, 2017). The consensus that the committee came to was a push for a broader understanding of  scholarship in terms of understanding the equality that is n

 Week 5: The Spatial Turn: Historical GIS and Spatial History in Theory and Practice What is GIS? What is historical GIS and how has it been applied to key episodes in American and European History?  GIS is short for Geospatial Information Systems, and is a digital tool used in a variety of applications to promote the understanding of geography as it pertains to projects involving surveying, architecture, and even intelligence. The field is newer in comparison to other disciplines, evolving constantly as technology surrounds it. Even in the field of History, GIS is making a positive impact on understanding nuanced aspects of history. Anne Kelly Knowles makes an important distinction between the typical usage of GIS and the new, historical approach to using GIS in a research perspective; "The key difference between historical GIS and the vast majority of GIS practiced today is that its source data typically include archival material that must be converted from analog to digital for

Week 4: History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Digital Research      Understanding the new era of history in the digital realm raising multiple questions about the structure and path in which research and credibility takes the historian. The past few decades have called for the serious questioning of archival practices and bias created by algorithm in researcher practices. Ian Milligan is the Associate Vice-President in the University of Waterloo's Office of Research. Primarily, Milligan focuses his research on web archives and their implications for researchers and historians (University of Waterloo, Ian Milligan, 2023). In his book,  History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research, multiple themes of bias, data structure, and ideas surrounding the digitalization of history are understood.  Privatization: Unspoken Bias in the Digital Realm      One key aspect that I found interesting was Milligan's understanding of the fra

Digital History: Understanding "Promise and Perils" to an Evolving Field