“The use of Digital Technology to both represent and analyze a store of information.” http://digitalhistory.unl.edu//interviews/alkalimatint1.php
After reading our material for this week I think that the definition of Digital History can be broken down into two sub-definitions. One is the above statement which alludes to the use of digital technology within the field of history, the other is a much more literal definition.
The literal definition of digital history is the history of the digital technology itself. In the case of digital history the two significant inventions are the computer (and its related accessories) and the internet. It is these key inventions that have made digital technology a good medium for historical information.
Our reading for this week completely skipped over the early history of the computer and largely skipped over the early history of the internet (1980s, ARPAnet,etc). Instead the focus was on the development of some of the first easy to use software packages designed for exploring the Internet with ease. This began with Mosaic in the early 90s, largely succeeded by Netscape (as the most popular tool for exploring the internet in the mid to late 90s, before being succeeded my Internet Explorer. It was the development of Internet Exploration Software that made the internet usable to the general public for the first time and expended the use of the web for transmitting historical information.
Along with this the background history that we read also focused on the creation of usable and reliable search engines for the internet. In the last fifteen years the amount of historical information and material available through online databases (government, commercial, or private) has increased exponentially. Because of this a complex search engine capable of finding relevant sources for a particular topic is as necessary as a web browser. I found it particularly interesting that a search engine that was once considered state of the art (yahoo), is now rapidly becoming outdated because of its inability to find some of the less organized and cataloged sources on the internet.
With the development of web browsers and search engines the use of digital technology as a tool for store and representing historical information/material became practical as well as viable. Beginning in the early 90s many government and private interests began exploring online digital databases for storing and transmitting historical materials/information.
If you were to ask me who pioneered online projects I would guess either the federal government or a large corporation; essentially some organizational body with a lot of funding available. It was no surprise that the first group to create an online digital archive was the Library of Congress using collections that they had digitized as early as the 1980s.
As digital storage space increased and became more readily available (at an increasingly lower price), digital databases began appearing from smaller government, academic, and even individual sources. A good example of the increasing ease of creating a digital database is the Anti-Imperialism in the United States 1898-1935 online collection. This was a database created by a Syracuse University Graduate Student named Jim Zwick using his dissertation and other materials from his research. In many ways you could argue that Jim Zwick was one of the forerunners of bloggers who publish their personnel interests and projects in an online digital database.
As for the Boilerplate comics, although intended to be silly they are an inadvertent testament to the ease of manipulating digitized information (photographs in Boilerplate's case) and the need to make sure information is produced or reproduced accurately when it is published in an online database.
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