In reading this week’s assigned articles, I found myself surprisingly emotionally defensive to how I regarded digital history.  In a lot of ways I think I share Ayer’s initial optimism for the potential of incorporating digital media into the practice of history.

I also agree that I don’t think the full implications of digital technology has been stressed enough- at least based on my limited experience as a history student- for its full potential.

              Even though Ayers wrote his essay in 1999, when the online community and digital technology was in a lot of ways still in infancy and only beginning to become integrated into everyday life, he already speaks of multiple uses and mediums that will eventually cater to history.

Yet, it seems on the opposite end, that Cohen and Rosenzweig who wrote their essay in 2006 when it was much more common for every day people to rely heavily on digital media for their source of information. So it baffles me that they meet the subject with what comes across as skepticism and a position favoring only partial reliance.

              And I think this ties into what Ayers mentioned early on in his essay, that historians tend to ignore the wants of the general public. I think the traditional study of history as a literary narrative, with its complicated and intricate footnotes and descriptive wordiness, has indeed become so disjointed from what the every day public practices with quick, immediate, bare minimum facts of information.

                Cohen and Rosenzweig highlight a few criticisms they have with digital history that I think can be easily solved. One I noticed was they stated the internet does not distinguish between the true and false. I would argue that if more historians and organizations embraced the available possibility for databases of primary sources, interviews with colleagues highlighting key subjects, reconstructed digital maps of historic locations or animations of battle tactics (just to name a few possibilities) that it could much easier for the every day public person to merely click away on their iPad and consult outside sources in order to verify facts. Whereas before when history was published strictly in print, and yes there had to be citations to sources, how many people outside academic history were truly knowledgeable and had access to these sources to verify the facts they read?

            In the Interchange interview, William G. Thomas, I think, highlighted a skill necessary to the definition for digital history that needs to be stressed more- investigation. Digital history must provide an element of investigation for the public. If the concern is that it is easy to publish false histories on any web page that a regular person could purchase domain rights to- then teach students in history classes how to verify organization copyrights, author names that can be cross-searched, authentic photographic proof with captions explaining the relevance, etc.

            Yes, the amount of capacity available to historians will create an initially overwhelming amount of documentation and resources. However, I do not think this is bad thing. I think if anything historians years from now will have more to work with. If the element of investigation is not only stressed but cultivated in classrooms at an early age, that it will not be so difficult to find those willing to research through a larger amount of documentation. And I also think that the possibility of having even the mundane elements of our society documented will still shed future generations about the way we lived. Just because parts of our technology or the publics’ collective interests seem trivial and tedious now, does not necessarily mean that they don’t reflect our society’s needs or demands in some way.  It may just be too difficult for those living in the present to see things similarly to how we now view those in the past.

            Personally, when I think of the possibilities for digital history, I try to stay on the optimistic side. I agree with Ayers that history as a subject has some of the most potential to utilize technology, and often times it saddens me to hear accounts from those who are more attached to traditional history and prefer to shun the possibilities as “overly complicated” or “a fad.” We live in a world where technology can program a heart when to beat, tell a jet plane where to land without a pilot, or predict what year the sun is going to explode. If we can have this much control over our present and future, then why can’t we apply similar innovative thinking to shedding light on our past?