Digital History

What is digital history? The American Historical Association offers the following explanation:

On one level, digital history is an open arena of scholarly production and communication, encompassing the development of new course materials and scholarly data collection efforts. On another level, digital history is a methodological approach framed by the hypertextual power of these technologies to make, define, query, and annotate associations in the human record of the past. To do digital history, then, is to digitize the past certainly, but it is much more than that. It is to create a framework through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a major historical problem. [Click here to learn more.]

Like many institutions, Middlebury is embracing the emerging field of digital history, which has important implications for public history and the dissemination of information to a popular, rather than academic, audience. While scholarship remains the foundation of the discipline, the creation of history within a digital context requires equal attention to accessibility. The digital world provides a wider audience than the discipline has perhaps ever enjoyed, and the field of digital history provides an opportunity for historians to present scholarship in an accessible way.

The  rise of digital history at Middlebury trains students to write for both public and academic audiences. As students, we want to impress our professors with sophisticated arguments and language, and the latter is often to the detriment of the former. A digital platform allows students to hone their scholarship with a focus a clarity rather than erudition. Professor Kathryn Morse, who will co-teach the digital course “Vermont Life‘s Vermont” in fall 2018, considers these courses an experiment in how to present information outside of an academic essay, a skill that will serve students both within and beyond the world of academia. “Vermont Life‘s Vermont” will explore Vermont and its cultural, historical, and environmental meanings, and contributes to an interdisciplinary effort to explore digital and collaborative methods of teaching, research, and publication.  The full course description is below:

HIST/AMST 445 Vermont Life’s Vermont:  A Collaborative Web Project

Students in this course will work collaboratively to build an online history project aimed at a wide audience.  Since 1946, Vermont Life magazine has created particular images of the landscape, culture, and recreational possibilities in the state.  Our goal will be to construct a website that examines the evolution of these images and the meaning of the state over time, paying particular attention to consumerism, the environment, tourism, urban-rural contrasts, local food movements and the ways that race, class, and gender influence all of these.  The course is open to all students and requires collaborative work but not any pre-existing technological expertise.  Morseand Newbury.  3 hrs. seminar.  HIS AMR.

Explore the following links to see examples of past digital work by Middlebury students across several departments.

The American Studies Web Museum: An ongoing project to create museum exhibits about localized aspects of American History that can be used as curricular resources.

Dances with Avatar: A winter term course taught by Professor Morse that explored stories of colonial invasion, military conquest, and environmental exploitation in the films Dances with Wolves and Avatar.

BiHall View: A website created by Jake Faber ‘16.5 to appreciate and reflect on the landscape seen from Bicentennial Hall.

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