Descriere:
This month we begin a series of columns called Digital History which looks at how new technology is changing the way people study and engage with the past. Paradoxically, the embrace of new technology by historians seems most likely to advance the study of the very periods – early modern, medieval, classical, even those recently thought prehistoric – which less enlightened university administrators increasingly regard as expendable.
Regular readers of History Today have already been introduced to the pioneering work of Daniel Lord Smail and his colleagues at Harvard University who employ the science of genetics to track the movements and activities of peoples who lived long before the invention of writing. The language of genes is the source they left behind. The growth in global history over the last decade, pioneered on America’s West Coast and in Britain, has been due in large part to the communications revolution that underpins the globalisation of our own time. The history of the book, of printing and publishing, with its obvious parallels to today’s information revolution, has benefitted enormously from the use of software programmes that enable the most rigorous analysis of texts, allowing scholars to better understand the motives of their authors, their publishers and their readers. It has already profoundly affected our understanding of, for example, the remarkable ferment of ideas that characterised the English Civil Wars.
It is graduate history students who are often most active in this field, exchanging software, creating blogs and tweeting friends, many of whom they have never met physically, about forthcoming online ‘carnivals’ at which scholars and enthusiasts congregate virtually to share and discuss their insights. Using the new to shed light on the old will have major consequences for academic institutions. One of the pioneers of digital history, Steven Mintz of Columbia University, has pointed out that while many colleges ‘are favourably impressed by graduate students who have developed online resources or an electronic portfolio’, they also have a ‘responsibility to give our students the training support they need to meet these rising expectations.’ Those institutions that do not will see the brightest and best move elsewhere.
