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Writing History in the Digital Age ·
https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12230987.0001.001

Is (Digital) History More than an Argument about the Past?
Sherman Dorn

Digital history is one more historiographical development since World War II that has challenged professional historians' definition of scholarship. While oral history and quantitative social history questioned the primacy of the written document and an elite focus, they and public history challenged the centrality of the researcher trained in academic history departments, and postmodernism undermined the authority of categories.1 Of central concern is not whether the online world has infected humanities scholars in the United States with intellectual challenges (and status anxiety) but what new forms these are taking and the new professional and intellectual questions that digital history poses for historians.2 As younger scholars worry about what “counts” as scholarship in an online universe, fearing that their senior colleagues will not respect anything other than monographs published by university presses, they partly replay previous waves of concern about professional legitimation.

Other chapters in this book illustrate the degree to which historians have continued to extend long-term changes in the discipline. The use of databases for notes is a more sophisticated version of electronic note taking that started with the first laptops. Mapping locations of community events and resources is an extension of quantitative social history's wrestling with data. Social history “from the bottom up” becomes more intense and more public when members of a community can more easily contribute to and discover work about their shared history. Creating video games out of history is in some ways a new version of the simulation role playing that teachers have used for decades.

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Yet there are new opportunities and challenges that did not exist several decades ago. One is the ability to display primary sources and related data objects tied to those sources (tables, charts, and maps). As this volume's chapters by Stephen Robertson and John Theibault demonstrate, we are surrounded not just by the type of static images and data objects that historians have used to make arguments for years but by the ability to present audiences and interlocutors with manipulable objects, using software to allow readers to zoom in and move around, add or subtract data layers, change axes and variables, or set the data object in motion.3

The second feature that is new today is the spread of publishing platforms. One made Wikipedia possible. Another allowed this volume to have open peer review. At the same time, we have seen the erosion of the university press and subscription-based journal publishing as a viable commercial infrastructure for scholarship. The ease of disseminating gray literature and the growth of technological platforms for open-access publishing has undermined the case for continued reliance on subscription-based journals and university presses as gatekeepers with prepublication review. Intensified budget pressures on academic libraries have accelerated this discussion. The results have included more experimentation with alternative publishing pipelines and processes, as well as the challenges in intellectual authority captured by the chapters of this volume focusing on Wikipedia.4

The third development is an artifact of the production of history in the first few decades of the “digital age” in historical scholarship: historians' first-mover advantage. It arose from funders having a range of interests; from a few senior historians, such as Roy Rosenzweig and Edward Ayers, using funding to develop diverse projects; and from the development of digitization technology far in advance of electronic book publication. The first-mover advantage for CD-ROM and then web projects leveraged interest in digitizing a range of sources at a time when it was neither technologically realistic nor professionally advantageous to try to publish long-form arguments online. Into that gap stepped funders, institutions, and individual academics and teams of scholars who had different priorities. At the same time, two developments at a national level in the United States created educational audiences as well as funding streams for a range of projects: a push for state-level standards in traditional K–12 academic subjects, including history, and a dedicated funding stream in the Teaching American History grant program.5