Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

by Daniel J. Cohen, Roy Rosenzweig

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title



Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web provides for the first time a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians--teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts--who wish to produce online historical work or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.

The book takes the reader step by step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy to use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and reaching and responding to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance for ensuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years. Throughout, Digital History maintains a realistic sense of the advantages and disadvantages of putting historical documents, interpretations, and discussions online.

The authors write in a tone that makes Digital History accessible to those with little knowledge of computers, while including a host of details that more technically savvy readers will find helpful. And although the book focuses particularly on historians, those working in related fields in the humanities and social sciences will also find this to be a useful introduction. Digital History builds upon more than a decade of experience and expertise in creating pioneering and award-winning work by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, Theory, Technology, Education

328 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2005

About the author

Daniel J. Cohen is the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which is bringing together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and making them freely available to the world.

Until 2013 he was a Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. My personal research has been in digital humanities, broadly construed: the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge, from the nature of digitized resources to twenty-first century research techniques and software tools to the changing landscape of communication and publication.

Reviews

[Abby Sitzmann]

Read a good chunk of this for my Digital History class (but not all of it). Some very interesting insights--some of which are outdated and some of which are still relevant!

[H. Givens · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to create a website about history in any way shape or form, this book is cheap enough to be worth picking up. The concepts are specific, yet general enough to be useful for you. Some of it is out of date, but it's really just incidentals -- most of the book doesn't deal with extreme technicalities, it's more "topics to consider" and choices you'll need to make.

That said, if you're already tech-savvy, you probably don't need this book. If you're already tech-savvy, you don't think the way these guys think. Things probably seem like second nature to you or obvious questions, not enormous conceptual hurdles. Plus, since the book came out, new tools have appeared that make things easier for you.

For more information and some discussions of specific chapters/topics, see my blog posts: http://hannahgivens.wordpress.com/tag...

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read this entire book, just the introduction, which provided a good discussion of the pros and cons of sharing historical materials and discourse on history online. The authors have been engaged with history online for over a decade, so they also provide a good historical perspective on the different reactions of scholars. Finally, they sketch out the characteristics of successful history websites. This book would probably be useful for scholars in other disciplines as well.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great way to look at history websites. The history of the early webpages was interesting. I actually learned something about websites and the difficulties that comes with making one. I also recommend reading the online version (thats what I did) because you can check out some of the links to the webpages that Cohen and Rosenzweig talk about. If the links don't work, they at least have a screenshot of the home page.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great ideas about the need and importance for digital tools in studying, archiving, and teaching history. A lot of the specific computer details are dated in 2015 – nobody uses Microsoft Dreamweaver anymore! – but the themes and optimism conjured up by authors Rosenzweig and Cohen are still compelling.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent book on the subject. An important reference book for anyone in the field of digital history.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great introduction to digital history, though since the book was written about a decade ago, several of the examples are now out of date.