And yet, undergraduate researchers voiced a desire for someone to “look over their shoulders” and ensure they were using appropriate tags and sub-tags
I feel that this is a recurring problem experienced by all researchers whether that be historical research or lab-based research. There's always a chance that something could be messed up so having someone there to double check or ensure you don't mess it up during the first time would probably give a lot of relief.
When we embraced digital discomfort as an inevitable experience and discussed it among the research team with emotional transparency, we found that it contributed to heightened research consciousness for scholars of all career stages.
This is very important as it can also reduce potential biases that may arise when analyzing these sources. If digital discomfort were not embraced, it could probably affect everything from the tags to the interpretation of the postcards themselves.
The social media of the early twentieth-century, it could be argued, was postcards.
It's interesting cause I probably wouldn't make this comparison but could definitely see how posts can be compared to postcards in The Suffrage Postcard Project. If posts were to be compiled similarly in the future, it would probably be very overwhelming or virtually impossible to categorize in a way like SPP does.
Digital discomfort
It's interesting how the term "digital discomfort" can take on multiple meanings from whether it's discomfort using tools or discomfort experienced when interacting with sources online. It's possible that this is something that will continue to be unavoidable despite extended dependency on the internet.
infused with Afrofutur-ism’s spectral and prophetic vision, scholars of slavery can be informedby this new black digital practice as it emerges, learning from its attentionto the descendants of diaspora and deep care for black humanity.
Through a digital medium, history can both be looked at and made simultaneously. These are feats that I don't believe could be achieved in real time via an analog method.
The design of the new website reflected a new attentionto pedagogy, analysis, and the human dimensions of black life in the era ofthe slave trade. Along with the database itself, the site featured long-formessays by scholars from around the world explaining the significance ofthe slave trade to the making of the Americas. Designers diversified thedata available for research by including lesson plans for K-12 teacherswith suggestions on how to use the slave trade database as a teaching tooland nontext resources like images of the original ship manifests, samplemaps, and portraits of trans-Atlantic sojourners like Job Ben Solomonand Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave
It's amazing to see how technology and the internet have allowed for a wider reach in terms of education and gaining multiple perspectives from scholars/historians who may not have had access to a similar database if they were restricted to analog methods.
There is nothing neutral, evenin a digital environment, about doing histories of slavery, and technol-ogy has not made the realities of bondage any more palatable or easier todiscuss across audiences or platforms
I agree. The initial perception that it might make learning and reading these accounts easier may be because it can feel that these lives are reduced to numbers to a certain extent. In reality, it has and will continue to be a difficult topic to broach when provided context beyond the numbers and in general.
In a digital media environment, lurkers, commenters, visitors, viewers,and users replace readers
At this point of the reading I definitely notice the shift in describing those who visit websites but I don't believe the terms used are mutually exclusive. There may be a wider range of the type of readers such as those who skim through it or use it for analysis so I feel that there is overlap.
For abolitionists, Neptune’s death, though narratedby Stedman, who was far from an abolitionist, offered readers necessaryexplanatory data. It offered neutral, stable, even quantifiable informationabout the depravity of bondage.
It's interesting to see how a work/primary source can be transformed to achieve desired ends as well as give context to a source through a secondary source that could later be used for statistical purposes. While I could see how this experience of Neptune and Suriname could be used in conjunction with historical analysis methods, I could also see how it may reduce these individuals to numbers.
This pattern from the past is exacerbated by disparities in the present. Digitiza-tion projects centered initially in English, secondarily in other Western languages.
In addition to not understanding English, this is further exacerbated by the lack of accessibility to the internet which is a source of learning English for many.
What are some ways that this can be alleviated? Should digitization projects have translations or should learning English be required in some way/form?
This has greatly increased the likelihood that historians will formulate hy-potheses about causes or impacts outside the national or regional scope of our initialexpertise. And it has enabled new forms of old methods, microhistory among them,that we can use to test those hypotheses.
In this way I feel that historians can be more efficient in compiling and integrating primary and secondary sources. Of course there will also be disadvantages to everything but this should mean that the training historians undergo must be more rigorous in the analysis of these sources and fact check one another when possible.
is about seeing connections across bor-ders and taking seriously both the connections and the borders.
I think this is obtainable more now than ever before. It's important to recognize the significance of both and how each shapes our current understanding of history. With biases that have existed in the past however, I can see how it can be difficult to overcome or completely eliminate in the present.
Source-anchoring reinforced the nation-state bias that was built into our disci-pline from the start.
As someone who has grown up with technology and primary sources that are not limited to the region I'm in I don't think this sentiment was as overarching as it had been in the past. While I have been limited at times due to the country I'm in, I have not felt it was done to reinforce a nation-state bias.
Yet those of us trained in an analog age can look back at how information used towork, and measure the transformation
The distinction Putnam makes is very clear. I wonder how historians trained at different periods of time view this digitized turn and what the consensus is. From an outside perspective it seems like engaging with primary sources through technology would complement and benefit the wider understanding of history as a whole. I could see how those from an "analog age" can be disgruntled by it but the advantages afforded by technology is one that cannot be ignored.
But increasing reach and speed by multi-ple orders of magnitude is transformative. It makes new realms of connection visible,new kinds of questions answerable
I agree that while it may feel like a smooth transition, the impact it has had on the compilation and integration of history as a whole has changed drastically. Similar to a non-linear path of consuming information, we seem to take these advantages for granted.
Yet the length ofstays shrinks as destinations proliferate and technology speeds capture. We treat ar-chival citations as evidence that the experiential education that fieldwork once pro-vided has been gained, but this is a questionable presumption.
I can understand this sentiment and would also question if this ease in finding information is equivalent to the fieldwork that had to be performed to find such sources in the past. With this passage, I can agree that there may be less incentive to dive deep into a certain source when it feels there's also many others that need to be looked at.
Forthe first time, historians can find without knowing where to look
This seems to be something that has had a very large impact on the direction of history and how fast it can be disseminated to the larger public. It is something that can fall privy to the pitfalls of digital history but I think it can benefit historians more than hurt them, especially since they are more likely to determine if a document is a legitimate source.
Social network analysis helps digital historians to explore relationships between different entities and visualize them.
The added visualization provided by digital history allows readers to consume the material better. Especially with the speed in which these graphics can be made, learners of all types have equal access to information from this standpoint.
digital narratives offer historians the ability to create non-linear paths to explore themes and paths of argumentation and invite conversations with community audiences
I feel that this phenomena is often taken for granted. An example I can recall is reading a wikipedia page where you click the blue text that opens a new page. With digital narratives, further information can be provided to the reader if they choose without having to go on a tangent that might take away from the main article.
serious educational games requires an intense amount of technical and research resources to build and sustain as web browsers evolve and the use of mobile devices continues to increase
This kinda reminds me of the Oregon Trail where game-like, interactive methods for sharing information with students allows for a better understanding of the topic at hand. It seems like it has trended towards that as access to technology increased and became more normal to see in academic settings.
collaborate with students and community groups, including African American churches, to transcribe documents and research the lives of individuals mentioned in meeting minutes, most of whom are not national figures
While creating physical spaces for archival material is a collaborative effort, digital collections provide a space where much more people can be involved. It is also possible that with this wider reach that more obscure individuals such as those mentioned in the meeting minutes can be identified and humanized beyond their contributions.
Economic and social historians began adopting computer-based statistical methods in the 1960s to analyze historical data as means for documenting and quantifying different communities.
The 1960s seemed so long ago, especially with computers and statistical methods derived from a better understanding of technology. I would have though that the growth of digital history would have been more recent. It's also possible that the internet and digital history as a whole looked a whole lot different than what we might consider or perceive it as now.
It empowers individuals and organizations to be active participants in preserving and telling stories from the past, and it unlocks patterns embedded across diverse bodies of sources.
It's interesting to see how inclusive digital history is such as in the making and compiling of history in a digital format. As history is always in the making, the wide accessibility to technology we see in the present allows for individuals of all different backgrounds to add their insight and experience for those in both the present and future to look back on.
It is important to consider as well the “digital divide,” which is a blan-ket term used to refer to the uneven and unequal access to, or use of, digi-tal technologies based on social, economic, geographi cal, geopoliti cal, oreven cultural criteria.
Definitely during the pandemic, the digital divide was amplified, especially for developing countries who don't have reliable access to the internet and puts strain on parents and students to teach the material themselves. Even with this class and other classes I have, students worrying about unreliable internet or an old laptop remains a common occurrence.
The systems of oppression and trauma thatdominate the analog world have been amplified in the digital sphere, evenas many pretend it is exceptional because anyone can use and post tothe internet.
It's both interesting and shocking to see how much more amplified these systems are in the digital world. With many opinions and users flooding a given digital space, it may be difficult to find consensus on what is appropriate and whether or not to care at all.
Making technology an integral com-ponent of the historian’s craft opens new ways of analyzing patternsin data and offers means to visualize those patterns, thereby enrich-ing historical research.
When I was first introduced to this class, digital history as a research method was not the first thing that came to mind when defining history. I thought of it more as a field than as a way in which historians or other individuals can perform research using more recent technology and programs.
Depending on which methods and historiographies one elects todraw on, what is digital history and what is possible with digital historymethods can vary
It seems that as technology improves, the overlap between different fields within humanities and STEM becomes more apparent. It's interesting to see that statistical models and programs would be needed in order to analyze a large database of information in a more efficient manner.
historians of the future will certainly haveto confront digital sources and the internet when they ana-lyze the past.
For anyone performing academic research via online sources, I feel like it could be overwhelming to approach such a large database of information at once. While it's much easier to access, the depth may seem impossible to integrate into a secondary source.
on the basis of narrative reports and detailed descriptions of the curriculum (as well as recommendations, essays, and interviews), which collectively offer a fuller picture of the applicant than does a grade-point average.
With increasing amounts of applications to well-known universities each year and with little time to decide on whether to accept them. I wonder if such detailed reports would be overlooked compared to a simple sheet with standardized grades.
the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing
I definitely agree with this as there were classes in the past that I initially took because I was passionate about the topics they were covering but grew to focus more on getting a good grade. I imagine it must be worst for students who are not at all interested which may already set them up to fail before they even start the class.
Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
I tend to separate interest and learning since I can still try to learn something I'm not interested in. While I'm not surprised that it diminishes interest and that it negatively impacts grades, I find it difficult to envision some sort of standardized way in which material can be taught in an interesting way that still gives all students a well-rounded education.
Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades.
While I wish that were the case, I have always lived with this structure of assignments and assessments for a grade and find it difficult to alter this mindset about learning. I think I have this mindset because of how fast the quarter goes and how much information we need to learn within this short amount of time. If given a lot of time for learning, I feel that this type of approach might work better. While it might work for some classes in a given student's schedule, it might not be good for all of them to be structured this way.
I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing….Suddenly all the joy was taken away. I was writing for a grade — I was no longer exploring for me. I want to get that back. Will I ever get that back?”
I'm not sure when the last time I did an assignment for a grade however for as long as I can remember it seemed like I was always writing for a grade just so I can check all the boxes or get all the points of the rubric. While it's helpful in terms of figuring out how to get the best grade, it's not great if you have a passion for learning.