Why am I in this Class?

This semester I was recommended to enroll in a History 400 class, the most appealing of the options (and the one that fit my schedule) is titled “Adventures in Digital History”. I took this class not only because it fulfilled and satisfied portions in my degree but also in order to work on, and be enveloped in an area I deem myself weak. I also feel that this class will offer me with a more adequate understanding of the use of technology and digital aids for future research to also further help my degree. After the first day of class it occurred to me that  I am in for a ride, a grand ride on the technologic train to triumph. It will be a large amount of work with a new skill as the end goal.

What Am I Doing Here?

I’m not particularly technically literate. I pick up on concepts and instructions as well as the next over-aged college student, but site building intimidates me, twitter confuses me, and any form of coding has the rare quality of petrifying and boring me at the same time.

This is good. It means I’m no longer in my comfort zone.

The one thing I feel like I’m good at is primary research, and the topic at hand has a lot of potential for framing a complete picture with primary documents.

What am I doing here? I still don’t know, but I’m willing to find out.

Why I’m Taking Digital History

Digital History is the capstone class for my minor, which is Digital Studies. I am excited to combine my minor with history, a topic I am interested in, and have not been able to explore much in my college career. I look forward to documenting history in a way I never have before, while discovering a new side of digital studies.

Adventures in Digital History

Hey guys!  My name is Matthew Gaughan and I am a Comp Sci major and Digital Studies minor.  The first reason I signed up for this class was to fill the capstone requirement for my minor.  The second reason was because I wanted to learn more about older technology and what people did with their old computers and how it led to what we use today.  I think the class will also help my future career if I have a major digitization project on my resume.  In any case I look forward to working with you all!

Why Digital History?

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.

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.

 

css.php