Case Statement - National Council on Public History

course I expect that students will think about the possibilities for inquiry and expression
quite differently. Rather than indulging the rhetoric of rupture – that digital history is a
whole new world or changes everything -- we often end up having broadened the
modes of research and communication from the printed text to a wider variety of media
and think about the relationship -- even continuum -- between digital and analog
sources and methods.
2. Using visual media and understanding digital imaging is absolutely essential for
public historians, who engage the visual to such a great degree. Thus, I teach a bit of
photographic history and visual culture, photography, and Photoshop. I am coming to
think that some form of programming or scripting ability is essential because it gives
students the ability to create their own tools or make much better use of existing tools,
but I have not yet built this into my teaching yet to see how it works.
3. A key framework I use to start students thinking about the changes we are seeing in
digital technology is beginning with the investigation of older periods of media
transformation. I call it, "When Old Media Was New." While students have found
changes in digital technology often bewildering, I emphasize that these epistemological
upheavals are not new. Photographic documentation, the recorded and broadcast
human voice, and the motion picture were all quite decentering and disruptive media
that were eventually incorporated into a broader media landscape and into the work of
historians. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media has been a useful resource for
this and gives students some conceptual comfort as well as giving them some
background of the media that they will be working with later in the course.
I have also found course blogs to be useful for starting discussion, introducing students
to HTML vs. CSS, and building their understanding of relational databases. It's been a
useful addition (in all of my teaching now) that I heartily recommend.
I would like to hear a bit from group members on their experiences teaching
digital history to undergraduates. Despite some classic digital history projects,
the discipline as a whole has been slow to engage the digital (the AHA's recent
frenzy on the digital hardly makes up for this lost time). In part this is because
digital skills are so rarely taught to undergraduates -- the undergraduate
curriculum seems to be a place for education on disciplinary consensus rather
than experimentation. The debunking of the "digital native" idea has illustrated to
me that history undergrads are fabulously badly served in their education on
digital technology -- they don't pick up high-level, reflective skills by being "native"
to digital culture and the undergraduate curriculum does not make up for this. My
hope and expectation is that digital training at the undergraduate level will
improve graduate students' abilities and will eventually work its way up to the
faculty and researchers, but this is a long, slow process.