Digital History (2024)

FAQs

Is digital history a credible source? ›

Digital History also is listed as one of the top five resources in U.S. History according to Best of History Websites.

Digital history is an emerging field that draws on digital technology and computational methods. A global enterprise that invites scholars worldwide to join forces, it presents exciting and novel ways we might explore, understand and represent the past.

In the late 1980s quantifiers founded the Association for History and Computing. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s. The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks.

Digital history might be understood broadly as an approach to examining and. representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of. the computer, the internet network, and software systems.

The JDH is a single-blind peer-reviewed journal. It publishes research on all aspects of digital history. Abstracts must first be submitted via the journal website before full papers can be submitted. The managing editor will contact the author(s) to assess the feasibility of the paper.

Most Reliable Source of History: Primary Sources

Primary sources are considered the most reliable source of history due to their direct connection to the events and people being studied. These sources provide firsthand accounts and original documents from the time period under investigation.

"Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that takes advantage of new communication technologies such as computers and the Web. It draws on essential features of the digital realm, such as databases, hypertextualization, and networks, to create and share historical knowledge."

The Resources of Digital History

Historians can expand the presentations of their research beyond traditional books and journal articles by employing digital history resources such as text-gathering tools, interactive map builders, and data visualization.

The Latin digitus means "finger or toe," so it makes sense that by adding the suffix -al, which means "being like," we get the adjective digital, "fingerlike." The idea of the word referring to numerals began around 1938, soon becoming vital in computers.

The centerpiece of Digital History is an online textbook that describes itself as “an interactive, multimedia history” of North America from the pre-Columbian period to the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

When did everything become digital? ›

Explained by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the digital revolution, “also called the Third Industrial Revolution, is the change from analog, mechanical, and electronic technology to digital technology which began anywhere from the late 1950s to the late 1970s with the adoption and proliferation of digital computers ...

Digital history is the use of computers, digital media, and other tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research.

Digital history seeks to integrate computational technology with history methods and materials to their mutual extension and advantage.

Digital describes electronic technology that generates, stores and processes data in terms of positive and nonpositive states. Positive is expressed or represented by the number 1 and nonpositive by the number 0. Thus, data transmitted or stored with digital technology is expressed as a string of 0s and 1s.

A primary source is material that records a first-hand account of an event and are usually produced by people who witnessed or were involved with the event. Primary sources can also include sources created at the time of an event but are not first-hand accounts, such as newspaper or magazine articles.

A good rule of thumb is to avoid the following web pages and types of web pages: Wikipedia (This page can be edited by anyone and all information should be considered false until proven otherwise.) history.com (This page is created by television producers and not professional historians. It is not a reliable resource.)