Digital history

Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the Digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data visualizations, interactive maps, time-lines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. A researcher can interact with, explore and visualise, the output more easily than with conventional historiographical material. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D Modeling, and big data analysis. Utilising these resources the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories. Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the Digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data visualizations, interactive maps, time-lines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. A researcher can interact with, explore and visualise, the output more easily than with conventional historiographical material. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D Modeling, and big data analysis. Utilising these resources the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories. Early digital history in the 1960s and 70s focused on quantitative analyses, primarily of demographic data - censuses, election returns, city directories, etc. These early computers could be programmed to conduct statistical analyses of these records, creating tallies, or seeking trends across records. This research into historical demography was rooted in the rise of social history as a field of historical interest. The historians involved in this work sought to quantify past societies, to come to new conclusions about communities and population. Computers proved capable tools for that type of work. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, but the outpouring of quantitive studies by established scholars continued. Since then, Quantitative history and Cliometrics have been used primarily by historically-minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded The Association for History and Computing. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s. The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks. In 1982, the Library of Congress embarked on its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its collection on to laserdiscs and CD-ROMs. The library started offering online exhibits in 1992 when it launched Selected Civil War Photographs. In 1993, Roy Rosenzweig, along with Steve Brier and Josh Brown, produced their award-winning CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, designed for Apple, Inc. that integrated images, text, film and sound clips, displayed in a visual interface that supported a text narrative. Among the earliest online digital history projects were The Heritage Project of the University of Kansas and medieval historian Dr. Lynn Nelson's World History Index and History Central Catalogue. Another was The Valley of the Shadow, conceived in 1991 by current University of Richmond President Edward L. Ayers, who was then at the University of Virginia. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia adopted the Valley Project and partnered with IBM to collect and transcribe historical sources into digital files. The project collected data related to Augusta County in Virginia and Franklin County in Pennsylvania during the American Civil War. In 1996, William G. Thomas III joined Ayers on the Valley Project. Together, they produced an online article entitled 'The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,' which also appeared in the American Historical Review in 2003 . A CD-ROM also accompanied the Valley Project, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2000. Rosenzweig, who died October 11, 2007, founded the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University in 1994. Today, CHNM boasts several digital tools available to historians, such as Zotero, Omeka or Tropy. In 1997, Ayers and Thomas used the term 'digital history' when they proposed and founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia, the earliest center devoted exclusively to history. Several other institutions promoting digital history include the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online (MATRIX) at Michigan State University, Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. In 2004, Emory University launched Southern Spaces, a 'peer-reviewed Internet journal and scholarly forum' examining the history of the South.