For me, digital history is a temporary label that seems to be needed as historians adjust to the implementation and evolution of modern information technology. One imagines that as historians began to move from oral histories to written ones that for a while history was called “papyrus” or “scroll” history, and then after a time as the new technology was adopted, just history again. Similarly, in the move from the written to the printed word—print or book histories, and then with adoption, just history again. In the end, the tool doesn’t necessarily change the ends of researching, compiling, and delivering a history, but the mechanisms, the economics, and what is possible to do with them change in a much more powerful way.
The audience reach of a scroll was superior to the reach of the individual relaying and oral history from memory. Today, we know about someone like Augustine of Hippo even though he perished in the Vandal’s siege of Hippo in 430 A.D. because his writings on scrolls had been disseminated throughout the Roman empire and were maintained and accessible to an educated elite. With the advent of the printed text, Augustine’s writings became more widely available. With digital technology, they are available globally 24/7 in video, audio, and text formats.
In the current transition of history from print to digital, a transition that has been underway for about 60 years now, digital history, to use the transitional term, is the application of the tools of information technology to the practice of history. So, what are the tools? The digital tools are computer and computer-based network hardware and software and the implementation standards that enable far more efficient production, manipulation, and dissemination of voice, video, and text used by historians for some historical project’s end. Historians include using Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s broad definition: “amateur enthusiasts, research scholars, museum curators, documentary filmmakers, historical society administrators, classroom teachers, and history students at all levels”. When compared to print media, digital media and networks provide historians and their audiences with more cost-effective methods. These include methods for storage, access to materials, flexible analysis and presentation, more diverse means of analysis and presentation, ease of manipulating data, audience interaction with the presentation, and freedom from hierarchical control.
