Practical tips to digital history is the best what to describe this week’s readings. Roy Rosenzweig’s article, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” is an example of how Digital History can be incorporated and his collaborated effort with Daniel J. Cohen in their text, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, is the ideal guideline for both the novice and experienced historian working with digital histories.
Rosenzweig’s article gives an objective look at Wikipedia’s digital model and how it is both a positive force for historians even with its downfalls. He begins his article discussing Wikipedia’s origins and founders, then reviews how the site works and its overall goals of identifying its desire to be an encyclopedia that avoids biases, does not infringe on copyright issues and respects the contributors. (121-24).
Additionally, and most importantly, Rosenzweig discusses how Wikipedia deals with historical facts. Reading the article it is clear Rosenzweig gives an objective overview of Wikipedia, he discusses the pitfalls, the pros and gives suggestions for tangible improvements. Readers learn that participation generally follows the “popular, rather than academic, interests of history.” (126) A natural pitfall of this is that authors write what interests them and that can end up being more news types events rather than specific topics or prominent individuals. (128) In addition, because most contributors are unprofessional incorrect facts can be inserted without notice and left for readers.
On the plus side, he indicates what an achievement it is for Wikipedia to have found “unpaid volunteers to write surprisingly detailed and reliable portraits” about rather obscure historical events or figures and uses Union General Romeyn B. Ayres as an example. (128) And even though Wikipedia is a collaborative effort and numerous individuals can contribute to a single interest there are “personal watch lists” alerts for individual’s most popular entries and a historical record of entries made that allows for errors to be corrected–although this does not always occur–it does help keep the posts accurate.
Overall, Rosenzweig’s article is a progressive outlook to digitizing history. He argues that rather than whining about the quality of what is available on the Web then as historians “that we have a responsibility to make better information sources available. online.” (137) After which he suggests that historians create collaborative historical texts, which can allow for a more extensive history for student. Then to show his dedication to the idea, he and Daniel J. Cohen publish a collaborative text to teach how to digitally create historical websites. A book that gives practical advice on what to include on a website, how to narrow topics, suggestions of how to determine whether a project needs additional software, ideas of what to include on a website, how to build an audience, copyright issues, etc. Nothing, in my opinion, is more proactive or impressive than someone who identifies a problem, researches the issues surrounded the problem and then attempts to find a workable solution.
thoughtful art 