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.

| Cover TItle Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Origin Myths of Computing in Historical Research 2. The Archival Revisionism of Mass Digitization 3. Digitizing the History Classroom 4. Building the Invisible College 5. The Rise and Fall of the Scholarly Blog 6. The Digital Past and the Digital Future Appendix: Digital History Syllabus Corpus (2002–2017) Glossary: A New Vocabulary Notes Bibliography Index Back cover |"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
|Adam Crymble is an editor of Programming Historian and a lecturer of digital humanities at University College London.