Digital History - What is it?

In beginning my fall course HIST 6330 History in the Digital Age at UNC Charlotte I find myself thinking back the fall of 1995 when I began working in the academic accounting department at NCSU. I knew almost nothing about computers and an hour after I arrived at the office a professor came with a floppy disk with notes on corrections that needed to be made to his book manuscript. The manuscript was in Word Perfect 5.0 a dos text program. I spent the first four hours until lunch trying to look like I knew what I was doing and during lunch I went to my wife’s office to get a 45 minute lesson in Word Perfect. Since that time I have become a big computer user spending time creating lots of my own digital records in the form of websites, emails, word documents, digital photographs and scans of photographs in vast numbers. I have found myself faced with the best methods of preserving these records and dealing with the loss of some due to accidents and equipment failure.

Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians (http://www.technewsdaily.com/775-information-overload-digital-age-presents-new-problems-for-historians.html) gives insight into the mind blowing rate in which new electronic data is being created. The article also covers the problems with obtaining some electronic records because of the companies that hold the rights and the blocks they put in place in trying to obtain the records. The introduction and first chapter of Digital History they discusses the progression of the web and creation of websites. I remember well learning to use Mosaic and Gopher, and then when I got Netscape 3.0 Gold I thought nothing could touch me I was the king of the web. I was creating webpages and making my place in the cyber world. Looking page at those pages makes me laugh now. They next talk about some of the forerunners in archival websites such as the Library of Congress’s American Memory, UNC’s Documenting the American South, and University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities’s Valley of the Shadow. Everyone is jumping on the wagon to get primary sources online some with extensive forethought and planning while ours appear to fly by the seat of their pants. The progression through this class and the detailed review of sites (both good and bad) will help to build my knowledge and refine my design process.