Ktheimer on Journal of Digital Humanities

Digital Historiography and the Archives

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The following pieces by Joshua Sternfeld, Katharina Hering, Kate Theimer, and Michael Kramer are based on our session at the American Historical Association (AHA) meeting in 2014, “Digital Historiography and the Archives,” and the series of blog posts based on our presentations that we posted on Michael Kramer’s blog, Issues in Digital History, and cross-posted on AHA Today.¹ We are thrilled that JDH invited us to submit our blog posts for publication. We had conceptualized the session as an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion with short presentations by each panelist, followed by a rich and multifaceted discussion with the audience.

Archives in Context and as Context

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Approaching the field of digital humanities as an outsider is an interesting experience. It is best compared, I think, to being a tourist in a foreign country for which there are no reliable guidebooks. It is a country in which the language is almost the same as the one you speak, and yet words are used to mean somewhat different things. It is also a relatively young country, still trying to define its national identity.

A Distinction Worth Exploring: “Archives” and “Digital Historical Representations”

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the original presentation of these papers at the AHA session, I was the final speaker on the panel, and so my talk was framed as a response to and expansion of the points made by the previous speakers.

In preparing for the panel “Digital Historiography and Archives” at the 2014 meeting of the American Historical Association, I had my usual trepidations about how the other speakers and the audience would frame their conception of “archives.” In writing my talk I read an article Josh had written for an archival journal in 2011¹ and was pleased to see his careful usage of the phrase “digital historical representations” as an umbrella term covering some of the resources presented by archives, as well as a range of products from other sources.