"What is Digital History?"

The history of digital history:

Digital history began in the latter half of the twentieth century with the storage of content on laserdiscs and CD-Roms.  Digital history as it's most widely known today first began to blossom on the internet during the mid 1990’s, and it burgeoned and ballooned rapidly during the ensuing decade.  Digital history online may generally be sub-divided between commercial or pay-for-access sites and non-commercial or open-access sites.  

What is it?

Digital History refers to massive storehouses online of various types of data.  Daniel J. Cohen, in the first chapter of his book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, sub-divides all that content into 5 general categories, namely: archives, numerous secondary materials, pedagogically-related materials, discussion boards, and organizational content. 

Evaluation of digital history:

      Digital, online history is both a boon and a burden to the dissemination of valuable and accurate historical knowledge.  It is a boon, primarily, because it radically increases both the rate and ease of accessibility to not only a broader but also a deeper wealth of coveted historical content (and commentary upon it) than was heretofore available to even the most well-connected scholar or researcher.  Perhaps the greatest aspect of this boon, is referred to as “hypertextuality,” a function of internet usage that enables users to follow more closely – and without the tendentious labor of poring through unnecessary or irrelevant content – the specific trails of information they intended to follow as well as to pursue felicitous tangents of piqued curiosity, via hyperlinked keywords and search engines.  There are a few critics of hypertextuality, however, but they utilize the same reasoning [and almost certainly the same online resources] as do its hundreds of millions of proponents (namely, that since web-users can single out and isolate specific themes or points of data within larger documents, they are not required to understand or hardly even encounter the context within which the original author presented the theme or data).

      Digital, online history adds a burden to the dissemination of valuable and accurate historical knowledge because of misleading, dubious, inflammatory or even false “informational content” that is so easily posted and propagated on the web.  Its “published” presence therein provides such content with a veneer of legitimacy, thereby potentially mis-informing many people.  However, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud and it’s due primarily to the presence of online discussion boards and to the ease of uploading content; the former, because they allow public perceptions of historical phenomena to be easily recorded and shared online, and the latter because historical enthusiasts may take original and previously unpublished archival data they’ve had in private possession and present it online for public access. 

The future of digital history:

Digital history in the future faces two primary problems that are much easier to describe than they will be to deal with.   The first problem relates to the copious quantities of content being constantly uploaded onto the internet, and the issues related to sifting through it.  The second problem relates to legal concerns like access and privacy; the various issues that arise due to such concerns in other areas of human interactivity have already and will continue to be legal issues in regard to digital history.   On the bright side, we may fairly and rightly suspect, however, that the future of digital history has much good yet in store to both offer us and be used by us.

One guarantee among all this: history has taught us that we never really know for sure what exactly the future holds.