What is Digital History? I am still not quite sure… I have a better idea now because of the class discussion on Monday night. I had no idea a discipline could be so hard to define, but now I can see how many different areas and things are covered by digital humanities, especially in today’s day and age when so many emerging technologies are being developed. Whereas historians and art historians tend to spend their time interpreting the past using primary sources and often not-so-recent secondary sources, Digital Humanists analyze the past while remaining ever-present in the future, using these new technologies to support their research.

I was thrilled to learn that Digital Humanities includes creating tools such as Zotero. I was introduced to Zotero last year in my Research and Methods class by Dr. Greet. If I knew how to include the “Mind Blown” .gif into this post, I would use it. As someone who prides myself on organization, I used to hate having a thousand tabs open and writing in multiple documents. Moreover, the bibliography was one of my least favorite parts of writing an essay. Once I started using Zotero, writing and research became much smoother processes. Thank you, Zotero.

Another life-changing tool is JSTOR, along with other online databases. Though I’ve been using these for years, it was interesting to know that the people and archivists who work on making these databases are part of the Digital Humanities field.

This field also seems like an interesting and helpful way to engage people with data, both past and present. I hear from so many people who say they hate history because it’s so hard to engage with in an academic and classroom setting. At the same time, it can be off-putting for people when they realize how much reading and writing it can take. The advancements made in the Digital Humanities could help remedy this and enable new ways to teach and present history.

Last semester, during my internship with the Mason Exhibitions Provisions Library, I conducted research on University Art Collections and the establishment of Campus Art Museums and public art parks. Now that I have some idea of the tools and areas that represent the digital humanities, I would be interested to see what tools are available to help with research. For example, I was researching many public sculptures and artworks on campus, compiling artist bios, and tracking how these works have historically connected to George Mason University.  At the same time, I was tasked with using this data to create a digital walking map and guide for the art on campus. My lack of technical ability forced me to use free online software such as StoryMap to enter this data. The problem was that these free-to-use tools did not accommodate the things I needed to make the art walks guide useful in the ways it needed to be. I could see the Digital Humanists developing one of these apps or tools that could be applied universally to other places that need to create digital guides and tours for visitors in their public art spaces.

I look forward to learning more about the digital humanities and the types of discussions we have in class.