My first technical assignment for the course was much more difficult than I expected. It involved working with Shared Hosting and setting up a website through my hosting account. At first, I assumed that once I had access to cPanel, creating and managing the site would be relatively simple. But even when I followed the instructions, things did not always work as I expected. In the end, rather than continuing to struggle with the new site, I decided to return to an older blog I had already been using.

At first, I considered this a failure. The purpose of the assignment seemed to be learning how to use a new technical environment, and I felt that I should be able to make it work. But the experience also made me think differently about what it really means to work in digital history.

Reading William G. Thomas and Douglas Seefeldt’s What Is Digital History? helped me see this experience in a larger context. The authors emphasize the importance of collaboration among historians, programmers, librarians, designers, and information specialists. My much smaller experience with cPanel gave me a sense of why this collaboration is necessary. Even creating a platform on which historical material appears can require considerable technical knowledge.

Thomas and Seefeldt also describe digital technology as a means of historical research and interpretation rather than an end in itself. A digital history project still needs a historical question and an argument. As they put it, digital history is more than simply digitizing the past; it creates a framework through which people can “experience, read, and follow an argument about a major historical problem” (Thomas and Seefeldt).

I was also interested in their idea that digital history can give readers a more active role. Instead of simply reading an article from beginning to end, readers can search materials, follow connections, examine primary sources, explore maps, and sometimes develop their own interpretations. This changes the relationship between the historian, the evidence, and the audience.

From Patrick Lewis’s review of Adam Crymble’s book, I learned that Crymble adds another perspective. He shows that digital history is not completely new. Technology has mainly changed how quickly and easily historians can find, organize, analyze, and share information. I especially found his discussion of blogging interesting. Crymble writes that “the real story of blogging was social rather than technological” (14). Blogs created spaces where more people could participate in historical discussion outside traditional academic publishing.

Digital history is more than putting historical sources online; it is the use of digital tools to research, interpret, organize, and present the past in new ways.  Historians still ask questions, examine evidence, and build arguments, but computers and the internet have made research faster, more searchable, more collaborative, and more accessible. In this way, digital history changes how historians do research more than it changes the basic purpose of studying history.