Digital History
There are many exciting things happening in the arena of digital history–that is, Web sites that offer innovative techniques for studying and understanding history. I wanted to highlight two such sites that I recently looked at.
The first is Historical Thinking Matters, which is a collaborative effort led by that fantastic office at George Mason University called the Center for History and New Media. HTM is an attempt to get students to understand history by engaging in that most elementary of activities: reading. Specifically, the site allows students to read primary sources and then conduct activities based on those sources to increase their knowledge of the issue in question. The site gives help at every turn, providing contextual analysis, vocabulary keys, and other supporting material to make sure that students can make their way through the sources without becoming overwhelmed. The site has all sorts of fun bells and whistles, such as a composition area that allows the user to type in an essay while working on the assigned activities–while still having access to the vocabulary help, supporting analysis, and so forth. The site only covers 4 historical topics (at least at present), but it points the way toward a way of studying history that is more engaging and potentially more effective.
The second site is Footnote.com. This site is oriented more toward consumers rather than students (although I’m sure it’s popular with students too), and it focuses heavily on the “social web” tools of collaboration and interactivity. The site has an incredible new section devoted to the Vietnam Memorial: they literally photographed the entire memorial wall and digitized each and every name, indexing deeply along the way to allow for a myriad of search methods. But that’s just for starters. The aim of this section is to allow users to upload images, make comments, and what not about individual names on the wall–just as people do at the actual memorial in Washington, D.C. The May issue of eContent magazine has a terrific article about the Vietnam page at Footnote.
We are hard at work on our own digital history site (a companion to our Milestone Documents series), which we hope to have live in the next month or so. Admittedly, it won’t be as stunning as these aforementioned sites–at least not at first. But we look forward to dipping our toes in these waters and to making a contribution to the rapidly expanding digital history universe.
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm
[…] I love how studying primary sources allows you to delve into such questions. And how great is it that the Internet provides access to so many primary sources? All of us who are involved with history education, whether publishers or educators or librarians, need to find fresh new ways to take advantage of these digital history tools. […]