I am taking this class because I would like to increase my proficiency with digital tools and learn about the methodology behind digital history projects. I believe that digital history is an important tool for making history more accessible and engaging for a variety of audiences. Additionally, digital history projects can further the preservation and increase the accessibility of historic resources ranging from documents and objects to entire buildings and landscapes. One of my interests is using Autodesk products combined with technologies like 3D laser scanning and infrared photography to document and monitor the deterioration of historic structures, as well as to create interactive catalogs to record the history and treatments for each architectural component.
Month: January 2016
Why I am taking this class
Jan. 13, 2016
Hello! My name is James Stewart. I am a junior Art History and History double major and Museum Studies minor. I wanted to take Digital History because I want to learn about how history can be interpreted online. I plan to pursue a career as a museum curator or collections manager and both of those positions use digital media to discuss history and objects related to the historical narrative. This class also interests me because we get to work on a project that can be used as a example of our skills to future colleagues and employers. I am also taking this class because it fulfills one of the seminar classes for the history major. I think this class will be helpful as well as very interesting and I am looking forward to a great semester!
Why HIST 428
My name is Callie Liberty. As a history major and digital studies minor I signed up for this class because it seemed to be a perfect combination of the two disciplines. I was really interested in taking this course because of the way it was described as integrating historical projects into the digital world. Digital projects and the ways in which history specifically is represented in a scholarly manner on web is a particular topic that I really enjoy. This course also had a great added benefit that I could potentially use it for a capstone for the digital studies minor.
Why Digital History?
Hello, my fellow peers.
I, once again, would like to introduce myself. I am Andrew Boswell and my major is Digital Studies. Adventures in Digital History is one of my required capstones for completing my degree, but I am not taking it for only that reason. Ever since I declared my major, I wanted to learn more about the Digital Age and be involved in its progression. I’m sure this course will help me understand and get familiar with the already archived history of technology and digital tools even more so than my previous course that I had with Professor McClurken.
I’m pretty excited to see how each of the assigned projects turn out!
Cohen and Rosenschweig’s Digital History, Intro
Reading the introduction to Cohen and Rosenschweig’s 2006 book, I was for the most part impressed that the observations made therein were still relevant. The authors did an excellent job of distilling the components that made up and still make up the field of digital history. Notably however, the book was written before the entrance onto the market of the Amazon Kindle e-reader. When commenting on the possibility of digital reading usurping traditional books, the authors had this to say.
“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. The more prosaic (and the most common) complaint centers on the difficulty of reading a screen, that is, the issue of poor legibility. But reading on screen may ultimately find a technological solution as high-resolution, high-contrast displays become cheaper to produce.”
As the Kindle has demonstrated, the readability issues in the technical sense have for the most part been resolved. Using an E-reader is no longer considered difficult, and the convenience of what can effectively be a portable library is hard to deny. That said, for various other reasons, the E-book has so far complemented rather than replaced print books. According to a Pew survey in 2014, only 4% of e-book users exclusively read e-books. In 2015, according to another Pew survey, e-reader ownership has actually declined.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2014/E-Reading-Update/Overview.aspx
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/the-demographics-of-device-ownership/
Given these statistics, it seems safe to conclude that this particular fear of “techno-skeptics” as the authors refer to them, has been demonstrated to be unwarranted, at least in the foreseeable future. In terms of e-readers and tablets with similar provisions for allowing users to read online content and e-books, this book could definitely use an update, certainly to the extent of a footnote or two about the statistics mentioned above.
Intro (Digital History)
I signed up for this class to meet the capstone requirement for my Communication/Digital Studies major. After reading a brief introduction about the course last semester, it became more appealing. To be honest, History was never my favorite subject in grade school, but I look forward to learning more about the transformation from then and now (analog to digital) and apply some of my digital skills throughout the semester. Being that the class is half history and half digital studies minors/majors, I think it’s a great opportunity for everyone to learn from each other and produce some quality projects.
Why I am taking this class
Throughout my college career, I have been able to get by with the bare minimum as far as technology. I am not on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Only in the past two years did I get a Pinterest account and yesterday I signed up for the first time on Twitter. Even though my lack of digital knowledge has not been a problem for me, I can already foresee how it will be when I begin my career as a middle or high school teacher. These days, it is not uncommon to find a sixth grader with a smartphone, which for me at that age was not even a thought. As I saw (and continue to see) more students constantly wanting to use technology, I realized that I needed to become more well-versed in things that I previously had no interest in engaging with, as well as useful digital tools, and this is the main reason I am taking this class.
Many of the students I have worked with in my practicums seemed to express little to no interest in history or social studies, and if they did, they were only concerned about getting a good grade in their class. When they would get bored, they would pull out their phones and become, as one of my professors in the College of Education put it, “actively disengaged.” As a future teacher, however, I want my students to be actively engaged, which can be achieved by “connecting the new to the known.” This phrase is one I learned in my education classes and it means to take the preexisting knowledge your students come into your class with and use it to teach them something new. In this case, if I can devise a way to incorporate technology, which is something my students are very familiar with, into my lessons, this will hopefully help keep them more engaged and give them a framework to understand new concepts in history and social studies.
Introduction: Why am I here?
I signed up for Dr. McClurken’s class for several reasons, the first being that it looked like one of the most interesting classes for this semester and I had heard good things from friends who took the class. On a somewhat more intellectual level, I am interested in gaining more proficiency with using digital tools within the context of the history discipline in order to promote more interest and understanding of history. I like using the Internet, both for personal entertainment and to do research, but I do not have too much experience with digital projects, so I am hoping to get a wider skill-set in the digital history field that I could use in the future out of this class.
