I have been putting off writing this blog post all semester. I wish I could say it is because I was waiting to write a grand narrative summarizing my profound conclusions about the digital history course, but in reality I have been overwhelmed as to how to approach a topic that fundamentally challenges the way I think about history.
Before entering the course, I had an extremely limited comprehension of the digital history world. The extent of my prior knowledge was confined to my familiarity with blogging and online journals, but even self-professed Luddites know their way around those mediums. Throughout the course of the semester, there were many times when I felt so lost that not even a GPS could help me find my way out of the abyss of algorithms, arduinos and acronyms. That being said, there were other times when I felt extremely enlightened, like I was rediscovering the historical discipline.
One of the more thought-provoking discussions in the class centered around the potentials and pitfalls of digital source materials – both those that are born digital and physical sources that have been digitized. As digital historian Roy Rosenzweig suggested in 2003, we are moving from a culture of scarcity to one of abundance in terms in the amount of sources we have available. However, the advancement of technology seems to be a double edged sword in terms of historical applications, offering new opportunities but also exposing new problems.
As someone who is primarily interested in social history, I am fascinated by the growth of social media and its ramifications for the future of the discipline. While there are many seemingly mundane things tweeted and posted, the pervasiveness of social media in our lives positions these seemingly irrelevant statements as insight into the vernacular culture of our time. Historians of the future will replace the often painstaking task of deciphering handwritten diaries and letters to the equally painstaking task of sifting through thousands of webpages and emails filled with LOL, TTYL, LMAO and other unusual acronyms. In this sense, the historical methodology is not fundamentally changing, just shifting in accordance with the new mediums of the current culture. What is changing however, is the amount of information being produced in the digital age. Our society's obsession with broadcasting itself is just one of the ways in which the historical record is becoming abundant. With over 140 million tweets broadcast on Twitter every day and subsequently preserved in the Library of Congress archive, it is easy to see how such an abundance comes about.
The advantages of accessing a seemingly endless amount of information seem obvious. If we look at the example of Twitter specifically, the ability to read people's observations and thoughts on a diversity of topics throughout space and time appears to be an historical gold mine. Historians looking back at the present age will be able to analyze trends, compare tweets cross-culturally, and observe the real time reactions of individuals to world events. The democratization of information through social media allows everyone to contribute to the production of the historical record, diminishing the power of the cultural elite to control the popular narratives of history.
The digital production of information only creates abundance because of the ability to easily store massive amounts of information. As Clay Shirky points out, we no longer have to question whether or not to save an item based on its value as an historical document as the availability of storage space allows almost any digitized material to enter into the historical record. The rapidity with which information is created combined with immense digital storage capabilities gives the illusion that the historians of the future will be able to access sources on almost any topic imaginable.
However, that access may be just an illusion after all. Our current infatuation with technology often causes us to ignore the downsides that can result from an overabundance of digital sources. From a practical standpoint, there is uncertainty about the stability of digital formats and a reliance on digital materials may paradoxically lead to a future scarcity of sources. The pace at which technological advancement occurs means that born digital documents may be rendered unreadable or incompatible with newer software. A new form of scarcity may emerge, centered around technological obsolescence.
If we alternatively assume that all the digital material will be adequately preserved for perpetuity, a more interesting problem emerges. As Rosenzweig notes, it is difficult to abstract generalized themes from primary sources on a particular topic when they number in the hundreds of thousands. The ability to store virtually everything may prevent historians from writing effective history as they are burdened by their objective to analyze the totality of their subject. It may be pertinent for historians to learn a few lessons from their brothers and sisters in the archival profession as they appraise all records to determine their value for future historical research. While this inevitably leads to the loss of some information, it is better to have a manageable historical record than a complete record that limits its usability by its sheer abundance.
Completing the digital history course does not make me qualified to judge the state of the historical discipline, but I am confident it will adapt to the problems posed by the digital medium and also exploit its potentials. The practice of history has never remained static and it will continue to evolve concurrently with society and culture.
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