Helen Marodin is a PhD student in Latin American History at the University of South Carolina. Helen’s major research interests include interdisciplinary approaches that deal with food history, women and gender studies, digital history, architecture, and art.
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Review of Adam Crymble's
A most basic and overly simplistic definition of history would state that the field comprises tracking and contextualizing change over time, which is exactly what Adam Crymble admirably does in
digital historyor not. Crymble argues that historians have chosen to gloss over the transformative role of technology for too long and claims that his book is a first attempt to overcome this
blind spotin historical inquiry. In his own words,
a history [of Digital History] also forces historians to acknowledge that their field is influenced not only by philosophical shifts and theory, but by each new gadget or piece of software coming out of the Silicon Valley
One of the main merits of the book, therefore, is an analysis of literature produced utilizing digital methods in the last decades, and how they provide opportunities to understand the synchronic relation between methodological and theoretical demands of the field and computational methods – in the context in which they were created. Rather than trying to define Digital History as a concise field in a single overarching narrative
eternal present
The chapters are divided into what Crymble identifies as the five realms of digital history: historical research, archive, classroom, self-learning eco-system, and scholarly communication channels. Chapter 1 seeks to institute the twofold origin of digital history as a set of practices that use computers for scholarly inquiry based on either records of bureaucracy
for quantitative research (begun by Frank Owsley’s
big datafor
humanities computing(begun by Robert Busa’s project Index Thomisticus). Chapter 2 focuses on mass digitization and archival practices as two intertwined factors that shape one another and, most importantly, not only revolutionize the way scholars conduct research but also the outreach of their scholarly production. The archival turn and the revisionism in library and museum sciences shed light on the ways archival entries (be they texts, documents, or artifacts) are selected and organized into collections and, conversely, how digital collections are built and presented. Digital collections and the access to them (consider the internet and the different devices we use), according to Crymble, create new spaces that profoundly change the ways scholars and public alike engage with collections and, consequently, with the past. Chapter 3 presents how digital technologies meet the premises of an already ongoing revision of teaching methods undertaken by educational theorists and psychologists in which lectures and teacher-centered methods are called into question in favor of student-centered approaches. Crymble identifies four waves of experiments in the teaching of history (data-centric, audience-focused multimedia, data analysis, return to history with some digital component) to highlight that, although digital methods are not the only innovative initiatives undertaken, the
technology-inflected history classroom
In Chapter 4, Crymble explores what he calls the invisible college,
or the support network that many historians and historians-to-be need to independently build due to the lack of institutional structures to contemplate computing and technological skills in their curricula. That encompasses an eco-system that provides not only self-learning resources but, basically, advice in what to learn and how. Chapter 5 analyzes how historians used computational technologies such as blogs as a continuation of older practices to share their work and communicate with peers in a space parallel but outside institutional centers of higher education. Challenging long-established and rigid academic hierarchies, historian bloggers create channels for disrupting disciplinary boundaries and build communities with similar goals that might surpass geographical and other limitations in unprecedented ways. Be it by presenting their findings to larger audiences, sharing research (and often activist) agendas, or simply ranting about the hardships of academia, social media certainly has demanded a more self-reflective attitude from history professionals occupying different ranks. Finally, Chapter 6 acts as a conclusion chapter in which the author clearly enunciates the greater contribution of his book: to disprove historiographies that neglect the impact of the not only methodological but also material influence of technology (encompassing computers, scanners, tablets, Kindles, cell phones, and so on) on the history profession in favor of intellectual influences. Moreover, he encourages historians to define their scholarship in specific ways rather than as digital history,
a terminology too broad and even disparate to convey any intelligible information.
Crymble invites historians to engage in collaborative work that will consider social, not only technical, differences across geographical locations and briefly cites examples of digital histories applied to different social and cultural contexts, such as the activist nature of the historical profession in South Africa, the translation of the
global village