Last week, we were asked to review Digital History scholarship and explore how history as a field has adapted to it over time.

Perhaps the greatest advantage to the expansion of digital history, and digital resources in general, is the increased access to sources. This makes research less dependent on the physical accessibility or location of an archive or repository. A physical resource could be in a different state, or a different country, and be available for use without having to travel or request a physical scan or copy and wait for it to arrive. With this greater access to sources, there can be the expectation of quicker results by scholars and students alike. Because information is so much more readily available, this makes sense. However, the availability of information also means that researchers have so many more resources that need to be sorted through and considered for valuable information. In this way, the abundance of information might actually make focused research more difficult.

There has been debate, especially towards the beginning of public digital history efforts, that the digitization of resources limits topics of interest to specific case studies, because those are more available than others of the same value. However, I’d argue that this has incentivized more institutions to digitize and make public their own collections. Virtually every institution wants to attract visitors who will utilize their collections. The more user-friendly a digital archive is, the more likely it is to be continuously used. In this way, digital collections could be used as a form of marketing. The digitization of resources also leads to collaboration between organizations. Not every organization has access to the necessary equipment to create digital resources, despite having a valuable physical collection. For example, over Spring Break I worked on the Aldie Mill ledger scanning project. This was a collaboration between the Loudoun Museum (owner of the ledger), the James Monroe Museum, the Papers of James Monroe, and UMW Dept. of Historic Preservation (parties interested in the ledger’s content), and UMW Special Collections and University Archives (scanning and processing using COBRA). The SCUA was able to act as a middleman for all parties that wanted a digital version of the ledger but weren’t able to produce their own with their current facilities. The outcome was high-quality images that could be shared across the UMW departments and the Loudoun Museum.

Note on dead links: the links for the 2016 Debates in Digital Humanities are nonfunctional (dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/77 and dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/83).