As is a pattern throughout history, every time a new form of
technology comes out, it is met with some form of pushback. Whether the people can see a need for the technology
(or not), makes little difference in society’s resistance to try something new. People do not like change, and new technology
means new approaches to solving an issue.
The field of digital history is not immune to this.
You would think that digital history and the opportunities
that it provides historians in the ability to compile data, and the new ways of
sharing their published documents with colleagues would be a welcomed
change. The most damning comment out of
the entire reading was a comment that Dr. William J. Turkel made about the
overwhelming outlook current historians have on digital history. Turkel
stated, “I think that many tenured and tenure-track academic historians assume
that digital history will somehow be taken care of by the next generation,
which is, of course, practically cyborg.”
While it is impossible to argue that the new wave of historians is not
more adapted to handle the constant changes that come with the Digital Age,
thinking that that will automatically translate into these students incorporating
digital history resources into their research and presentations is flawed. People will do things the same way that they
always have until proven beyond the reason of a doubt that there is a better
way. The can will continue to be kicked
down the road until there is a cohesive movement among historians towards everyone
implementing the existing technology.
The saying goes, “Those who cannot do, teach. Those who cannot teach, teach history.” There is a societal belief that historians do
not actually create anything, and all that is required to be a historian is
factual knowledge of events that took place a long time ago. Society sees historians as people who read,
write essays, but never really do much that is productive. Digital history provides endless
possibilities to finally put an end to that stereotype not only through the
ways to convey information, but also through a historian’s ultimate goal in
recreating the past through computer models, simulations, ect. Dr. Burton tried to make this point in saying that prior to the
computer, history was pretty much the “redheaded step-child” to humanities and
social sciences. It was difficult to
prove where history actually fit into the spectrum until computers provided
historians the tools they needed to work with texts tracing themes through
time. Programs like word clouds provide
historians the proof they needed to finally cement history’s place in the humanities.
