1 Because the medium is still so new in comparison to traditional modes of communication, and the technology is still rapidly changing, we historians have only just begun to explore what history looks like in the digital medium. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become prominent because of the wide interest in more spatial approaches to the past, but a whole range of technologies proved useful: Flash animation, XML coding, digital video, blogs, and wikis. They began using new tools that computational systems and networked information made available. But just as research techniques and tools were being transformed by the new media, would scholarship also change? If so, how, and in what ways?Ī whole new field opened up around the concept of digital history as historians tried to experiment with the new medium. The primary sources of the past were open for students in ways unimaginable only a decade earlier. history survey to specialized research seminars became more dynamic and student-centered. Research libraries took the lead in developing their catalogs and collections for online access. Eventually, new tools, such as JSTOR and ProQuest, opened up full-text facsimiles of journal articles and major newspapers. Big organizations, such as the National Park Service and the Library of Congress, put up web sites on major historical places and topics. Amazingly, people rushed to put their own histories on the web and to create sites dedicated to their favorite subjects. Even at the early stages of the web’s growth, history was all over the web. After the development of browsers like Mosaic Netscape and Netscape Navigator in 1994, the web grew at an astonishing rate into a global information network. Of course, we can see now that a communication revolution was taking place during those years and that it was changing the way we do historical scholarship and teaching. Both of us came into the history profession in the early 1990s and went through graduate school just before the remarkable emergence of the World Wide Web.
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