Digital History
A concise definition of digital history is found in the web article What is Digital History on the historians.org:
Digital history uses digital tools that are increasingly employed in many humanities disciplines. As history takes place in a spatial context, spatial approaches to the study of history have become more prominent, and, as a result, their geographic information systems (GIS) are key tools. Digital video, XML coding , and weblogs (“blogs”) are also incorporated into digital history. Digital history projects arise from core historical questions and provides its readers with space for independent investigation and interpretation. Archives are particularly essential to historians, who are increasingly creating their own virtual archives (Brennan, 2018). Although digitization – converting analog sources into a digital format, thereby preserving them – is necessary to make collections and historical works accessible, digital history is concerned with environments that enrich people’s ability to read, experience, and to understand the argumentation related to an historical problem (Seefeldt and Thomas).
Major digital history projects are presented as interactive websites that arrange collections of sources and related materials around a specific historiographical question. Several initiatives, including The Valley of the Shadow, Victoria’s Victoria, and the Spatial History Project are models of this type of digital historical scholarship. The latter project is also an example of research to better understand how spatial relationships, “the spaces we live in and inhabit—are distorted or warped rather than geometric or linear” (Seefeldt and Thomas).
In technical terms, future digital history scholarship is projected to further integrate advanced computational algorithms, Big Data analysis, and visualizations (Seefeldt and Thomas). Although the outputs of digital history scholarship have typically been interactive web exhibits, or web sites, some historians urge that the field move toward “doing” digital history, fostering and expanding process-oriented activities that employing new digital and media tools in research and analysis (Seefeldt and Thomas). In addition to the new focus on digital tools and the opportunities they open, history, as Cook University historian Claire Brennan writes, “must meet the challenge of incorporating and rewarding digital endeavours, but without losing its traditional strength of critical analysis” (Brennan, 2018).
