
Technology and the Historian
Transformations in the Digital Age
Adam Crymble(Author)
University of Illinois Press
Published on 13. April 2021
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-252-04371-0 (ISBN)
Description
Charting the evolution of practicing digital history
Historians have seen their field transformed by the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive-all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology's role in the field's development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars. Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together. Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era.
Historians have seen their field transformed by the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive-all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology's role in the field's development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars. Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together. Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era.
Reviews / Votes
"Crymble seamlessly integrates print, digital, oral history, and interactive source material to document the ways historians have responded, both individually and as an imagined community, to the social contexts that have shaped our interactions with technology." --Journal of American History"Crymble gives me a greater appreciation for how my own course in 'digital history' fits within and reflects broader patterns of discourse about technology and the past." --Corinthian Matters
"This book explodes many of the foundation myths upon which digital history has been built; and replaces them with a clear-eyed account that melds historiography, technology, and pedagogy. In beautiful prose Crymble has identified the streams of influence that have shaped the field."--Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Baltimore
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Illustrations
9 black & white photographs, 11 tables
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
513 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-252-04371-0 (9780252043710)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Adam Crymble is an editor of Programming Historian and a lecturer of digital humanities at University College London.
Content
CoverTItleCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Origin Myths of Computing in Historical Research2. The Archival Revisionism of Mass Digitization3. Digitizing the History Classroom4. Building the Invisible College5. The Rise and Fall of the Scholarly Blog6. The Digital Past and the Digital FutureAppendix: Digital History Syllabus Corpus (2002-2017)Glossary: A New VocabularyNotesBibliographyIndexBack cover