Analysis of this week’s readings:
This week’s readings all address some general themes regarding digital media and history. All the articles discuss the advantages and beneficial aspects of digital media, but also mentions alongside it the challenges historians face when utilizing the web, and other digital arenas. One of the benefits of this new digital age is the increase in the ability to make history accessible, engaging, and collaborative.
History and the Second Decade of the Web:
Cohen’s article clearly discusses the benefits and concerns regarding history and the web. He sees the web as making history more accessible, more engaging, and a new way to facilitate learning. He saw the internet as a way to facilitate and allow for greater collaboration, for instance between historians, between historians and subjects, or between institutions. Although I still have some difficulty accepting web sources as historical sources, I must say that I agree with Cohen in that they do make excellent supplements to the more traditional historical sources.
The Future of Preserving the Past:
One of the most interesting aspects of his earlier article was the discussion of using the web as a way to collect the past. For this reason I really enjoyed his second article which focused on this idea of acquiring the past in addition to presenting history through the web. Although some serious issues with this form of collecting exist such as provenance, and acquisition policies, I must say that the benefits certainly outweigh these concerns. This is a great way to utilize historical sources, and a great way to make the past, and more importantly the subject of history, more accessible.
History and the Web, from the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies and Interaction in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries:
Brown also continues with this theme of utilizing the web to facilitate learning, or as he coins it, “active learning.” Although this is not stated in the previous Cohen articles, I believe that Cohen puts forth a very similar message. Brown’s general them or idea was that this new digital form poses a few challenges for historians, but at the same time when used properly the web can be very beneficial in terms of teaching and engaging with history. I thought that all the links that Brown included in his article really enhanced the reading, and in a way, it provided a nice means of additional support regarding the proper use of the web. (And how neat was that Barnum Museum recreation?)
Sidenote: For a survey course on American history after 1940 my textbook actually came with the “Who Built America?” Part II electronic book, or supplement. And it actually is pretty neat. It has musical clips on it, propaganda shorts, speeches, radio broadcasts, all sorts of fun stuff, much like the first volume discussed in Brown’s article. It acted as a wonderful supplement to the textbook, full of primary source material (which are often limited to the sidebars in textbooks, if included at all).
