HIS 218: Intro. to Digital History: Writing Response to Rosenzweig's introduction to Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Presenting, and Preserving the Past  

Roy Rosenzweig's introduction highlights how much thinking about the Web has remained the same over the decades. In 1997, as Daniel Cohen points out in his chapter, "When the Web Was Young," Netscape, an early dominant search engine, was about to be overtaken by Microsoft Explorer. About that same time, I was taking a course, History of Print, in which the class considered among other things what effect the Web would have on print culture, education, orality, the future of books, commerce, etc. I guessed that there would be fragmentation ("balkanization" of the web as Rosenzweig more accurately calls it). My professor railed at the Walt Disney Corporation, anticipating, and actually already experiencing, broad copyright infringement,  claiming its copyrights into perpetuity throughout the universe.   

Many of these concerns remain contemporary. We are still reaching back to Gertrude Gimmelfarb's A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet(1996), because her concerns are still relevant each time technological innovations cause us to shift and change whether we want to or not. Among the articles Rosenzweig mentions, I also wanted to see Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? (2008). The point is, from time to time, the Web's vastness, ubiquity and" irrepressibleness" requires an assessment, and each time a writer, in this case a historian, takes the time to assess, contemporary issues only make sense if we first go back to the beginning to feel the still building momentum.

Rosenzweig writes, “Prophets of hypertext have repeatedly promised a new, richer reading experience, but critics have instead seen the digital environment as engendering the death of reading as we know it. Sven Birkerts has expressed the most profound sense of loss in Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” There is also a later take on the issue I like, “Literacy Debate: Online RU Really Reading” a New York Times article by Motoko Rich (2008). Both Birkerts, Rich and Carr lament alleged damage the Web is doing to our ability to focus and comprehend, and I would add what it really means to learn. At the same time I was taking The History of Print,  Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading was a bestseller. Again, the themes Rosenzweig discusses are part of the permanent ethical concerns surrounding the information age.

I am more concerned with the social and political implications of web development. Is greater global access being addressed? Can we combat misinformation,  the “dangers” Rosenzweig alludes to? How long before information becomes even more codified with paywalls as mega conglomerates gobble up useful information citizens need to make decisions about their futures.

 

 

Recently purchased

I am always looking to expand my book collection, not in the way I used to when I was a young reader, that is, by grabbing everything in sight, but by carefully scanning the shelves at used book stores, for instance, to see what might pop up and then seriously weigh whether or not a book is needed on my shelves.

Last week, I was lucky to find a good copy of A History of African American People: The History Tradition & Culture of African Americans (1995) edited by James Oliver Horton (The George Washington University) and Lois E. Horton (George Mason University). The couple were scholars of the antebellum South and African America experience. Today we have the internet, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In the absence of those resources when this particular edition was published in 1995, its highly illustrated pages and accompanying narratives were pored over for hours. 

 

Blogging as a tool for learning history

A blog can be a meaningful way to explore history as you learn and experience it. With this blog I hope    to contemplate what I've learned since I began the Public History Program at NOVA. 

A blog is an opportunity to contemplate themes related to the courses, themes and skills I have studies so far. It is difficult not to apply what I have learned in everyday life: "There's a Corinthian column!" "That house is Federalist style!" "Wasn't there a restaurant here before that school was erected?"  But what do you do with that information except glaze over the eyes of your family?

By addressing the public, a blogger takes on the responsibility of mastering a topic and explaining it to the best of her ability. Having come to care about all of the things I have studied in the public history program, I consider a blog a special responsibility, like teaching. 

With the internet as my classroom, I will keep the curious reader in mind and anticipate write what I think my audience wants to know.  Blogging is an interesting exchange as I share what I experience and the reader earns along with me. The reader also learns how my knowledge bank is expanding and how my tastes and interests grow with the blog. ~Susan