Why am I taking Digital History?
My first semester at UMW, I took Minecrafting the Asian Past. This class was designed to take what we had studied in the class about Chinese architecture and family philosophy, and implement it into Minecraft, creating a digital museum exhibit. This class was so much fun and so challenging. However, it showed me that history can be put into the digital field in a way other than an online archive. As a Museum Studies minor, this class fulfills an elective and a History major 400-level elective. I also am taking this class because the idea of creating something that can be shared with the public follows my passion of making history public to all and to tell everyones history.
“Once scholars can see the value of digital humanities to their discipline, once they have entered not a big tent, but a room devoted to their field within a house shared with other disciplines, then they are in a position to engage with digital humanities as an interdisciplinary field.” – Stephen Robertson, 2016
What is Digital History? What is Digital Humanities? How are they different?
Digital History takes specifically historical data and puts it into the digital world. This can be through creating digital archives, maps, or visual representations of history. It is the history field putting technology to its own uses. These can be used to research and share the past in a new way, rather than the traditional way of physical text. Digital History allows for history to be more accessible and available, allowing others voices to be heard rather than just scholars in academia. Digital Humanities takes humanities studies, which includes history, art, and literature, and uses the tools of the digital era to create interactive tools, databases, and data analysis. Digital Humanities changes the way people can interact with the humanities and how they understand them. These two fields sound similar, but are indeed different. Digital Humanities encompasses the field of history, but Digital History is it’s own field separated from the other fields of humanity studies. These two can work in collaboration with each other, which is highly encourage by those involved with both so that other areas of study, including these two, can benefit and learn from each other.
