Much has already been said in this course about the challenges and uncertainties facing the Humanities, but the development of our digital age has provided enormous opportunities for engaging with the past at the same time. After all, with regards to the larger history of information and its curation throughout the ages, it cannot be understated how fundamentally electronic tools changed things. Possibly the greatest advantage of digital tools is the unprecedented level of accessibility. The advent of the internet has especially facilitated incredible access to all kinds of uploaded information – however, the scope of this access is of course limited to what is uploaded onto the internet and how it is curated. A perfect database of human knowledge is naturally impossible to achieve, but the digital frontier still provides an opportunity for humanities-oriented people, especially historians, to employ the skills that they have always used in curating such information. Using Wikipedia as the foremost example, Brown and Olsen describe it as “a useful forum to communicate such complexities to the public, as well as an effective tool for future historians to improve their academic abilities.” As with their example of using it to engage with the history of Tiananmen Square, digital repositories like Wikipedia allow for a wide public engagement with history which depends on the effort and input of its contributors. The shortcomings implicit in often-anonymous contributors nonetheless opens more opportunities for engagement by opening the door for many additional perspectives and contributions. In the reading, Sadie Bergen posits that the “way historians tell history is in some basic ways incompatible with Wikipedia” due to its encyclical nature, but this only emphasizes the need for wider engagement with its topics to alleviate implicit biases. Like with past curation of history, the societal biases and perspectives of its creators are imbedded in Wikipedia’s framework, but its digital nature means that it is far more open to debate, modification, and adaptation, and it is important to make this fact more widely known. That so much information about the past can be widely available only underscores the necessity to teach why it matters and how to engage with it. Large-scale accessible encyclopedias like Wikipedia are only one example; digital tools provide an enormous variety of new ways at approaching and interpreting the past. The ease and relative freedom of sharing information itself makes teaching history smoother, but a wider range of contributions greatly helps both individuals and groups engage with the past. Wineburg reminds readers that “What once fell on the shoulders of editors, fact-checkers, and subject matter experts now falls on the shoulders of each and every one of us,” describing the increased sense of responsibility individuals have in parsing digital information, but this challenge for veracity itself should keep students and the public continuously engaged with our shared past. The more we keep people involved in recording, reviewing, and adding to the past, the better we can engage with its contents in and outside the classroom.

References

Bergen, Sadie. “Linking In: How Historians are Fighting Wikipedia’s Biases.” Perspectives on History (blog). September 3, 2016.

Brown, Jeremy and Olsen, Benedicte M. “Teaching Tiananmen: Using Wikipedia in the Undergraduate Classroom to Learn How to Write about Recent History.” American Historical Association. April 2012

Wineburg, Sam “Why Historical Thinking is Not About History.” History News 71, no. 2. 2016.