Learning Outcomes & Organization
- You will have an understanding of the different properties of the print and digital mediums and how they can be used to present historical scholarship
This iteration of the course begins with a discussion of print scholarship. Although we are all familiar with the print book and historical journal, we generally spend little time thinking about their specific features and the nature of their status within the profession. We next spend one class discussing the digital medium, focusing on the properties of computers and the web and how they differ from print. This focus of that class attempts to distinguish forms of digital scholarship from digital history. The use of digital methods involves various forms of digital presentation of research and analysis, including visualizing data. As a result, much digital history necessarily employs digital forms of publication. In order to help us think about forms of digital scholarship as an option for research involving any historical method, the readings and examples where possible do not include work by scholars using digital methods. We can adjust the syllabus to spend more time establishing an understanding of the digital medium if we feel that is necessary.
- You will have an understanding of how new technologies are transforming historical writing and publishing
Our examination of different forms of digital scholarship begins with digital forms of the article, book and dissertation. We then shift to digital forms of scholarship for which there are not direct print equivalents: blogs, exhibits, and podcasts. Those forms are generally available to a wider audience than articles, books and dissertations, and are widely used for public history. However, scholarship presented using those born digital forms is not necessarily public history, which also has to be created for a specific non-scholarly audience. In putting blogs, exhibits, and podcasts alongside articles, books and dissertations, this course attempts to focus on medium not audience, effectively considering historians as the audience in the first instance. Many of the readings on these forms of digital scholarship discuss their audience and how their wider reach shapes their content. To what extent different forms of digital scholarship reach and are shaped by non-scholarly audiences, how they relate to public history, could be a topic of our discussions.
- You will have an understanding of the development of digital scholarship
Since forms of digital scholarship first appeared with the spread of the internet in the 1990s, how historians have used them has changed. To address those changes the course devotes two classes to each form of digital scholarship: the first class examines the nature and use of the form in the early phase of digital history in the 1990s and early 2000s; and the second class examines the next generation of those forms of scholarship that developed in the last 10-15 years. (Dissertations and podcasts are the subject of only one class, as they have only recently been adopted for digital scholarship). An alternative approach would be to organize the course chronologically, looking at the early versions of digital articles, e-books, blogs and exhibits before then considering the versions of those forms of scholarship that developed in the last 10-15 years. Opting instead to consider each form of digital scholarship in turn is an attempt to treat early approaches as still viable frameworks rather than simply antecedents and artifacts, and thereby to consider changes in the practices of historians as not simply the result of technological developments but also how different audiences and professional communities respond to technology.
- You will be able to demonstrate how digital scholarship aligns with traditional historical scholarship
The final class considers how digital scholarship is evaluated by the historical profession. In part that focus is intended to highlight the professional implications of presenting your research as digital scholarship. History is often described as a “book discipline,” in contrast to the emphasis on articles in the sciences. That orientation has contributed to making academic historians slow to recognize digital scholarship and to put it on a par with print publications. It is therefore important to be able to articulate how digital scholarship is historical scholarship.
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