It’s always interesting to see what DH work finds its way into mainstream media and how it’s portrayed. This article by Steve Hendrix in the Washington Post highlights various forms of digital historical re-creation, from colorized photos and virtual reality to “voice cloning” JFK. For now at least, projects like these aren’t very representative of most of the digital history and…
future of history
DH Read: “Is Google Home a History Calculator?”
In this post, Sean Kheraj assesses his Google Home device’s performance as a “history calculator,” testing how well it can define historical terms and answer basic historical questions. He puts this in context with some history of digital history: In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague,…
DH Read: “Just Google It: A Short History of a Newfound Verb”
This WIRED piece by Virginia Heffernan reminded me of something that Jessica Dauterive, the other 2016-2018 DH Fellow, has brought up in our weekly DH Fellow meetings—that there was something much more playful, open-ended, and less structured about digital history during its earliest phase in the 1990s and that this playfulness is no longer integral to how digital historians think about their work…
DH Read: “Why We Need To Archive The Web In Order To Preserve Twitter”
I’ve been concerned about how much of what we see on the internet today will still be accessible to future historians of the 21st century ever since I read an article on the digital dark age for an independent study in college (fittingly, I can’t find it now). The article argued that although it might seem like historians studying the…
