What is Digital History?
Digital history has several branches that include but also extend beyond the digitization of the past. At a general level, digital history is “broadly any work engaging with new communications technology for the examination and representation of the past” (Keeling and Sandlos, 2011: 424). It is also a methodological approach “framed by the hypertext power of these technologies, to make, define, query, and annotate associations in the human record of the past” (Seefeldt and Thomas, 2009). As Seefeldt and Thomas explain, digital history involves creating a framework through computer- and Web-based technologies that enables “people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a major historical problem” (2009). Doing so has major effects on how history is practiced, including reimagining the meanings and uses of primary sources. Digital history is also a mode of communicating and disseminating knowledge (often called knowledge mobilization) using digital technologies.
Until recently, much historical research in the digital humanities tended to focus heavily on the digitization of analogue records and their subsequent online, digital presence. Beyond archival collections being digitized, however, digital archives are themselves important resources and subjects of digital humanities scholarship. The meaning of “digital archive” varies across different disciplinary contexts. For some, digital archives can be the digital extensions of physical archives (for example, online collections featuring digitized items from physical archives, such as Library and Archives Canada). Others make the distinction that digital archives are those that hold born-digital materials; that is, materials that were created as digital (rather than being digitized later) and include webpages, e-mail communication, databases, digital audio and video, and geodata from mobile devices, to name but a few (for more on born-digital materials and archives, see Wachowiak, 2022; Ries and Palko, 2019; Price, 2009). One of the main objectives for born-digital archives lies in the preservation of dynamic, mobile, and fleeting digital records, which also forms their biggest challenge.
As we have noted at other points in this course, doing digital history critically involves at least some awareness of the historical geographies of digital technologies. This includes an understanding of turns and practices, and how such trajectories fit into broader social histories of knowledge-power production. Doing history, whether digital or otherwise, is always a politically-charged practice. Some of the most obvious sites showcasing these politics are what have become known as GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums), which we will discuss throughout this module. Digital storytelling in the spatial humanities is not just about using spatial archives (which we will discuss in more detail in Module 4). Rather, spatial and place-based storytelling makes use of all kinds of collections, whether they are explicitly spatial or not.