HistoryRemix

I’m not entirely convinced that the analogy “Think of it like Facebook for the First World War” is accurate, but the new research model being proposed at Muninn WWI does offer a glimpse at the research potential when the web is used as more than an information repository.  Connecting up researchers and databases across the web in an effort to custom mine data places the historian in the same seat (passenger) as the marketers beneath the social networking sites, in not in the driver’s seat.  Dave Z has gotta see….we may entice him yet.

Originally posted on LibraryRemix.com

Noted as “the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone,” the engine allows researchers to enter a question or calculation, “using its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.”  Underdevelopment new algorithms are coming, which should make this tool even more powerful.  Data at our fingertips…quite literally.

Cameron Blevins, a graduate student at Stanford University, has been blogging about his practice as a digital historian since June of 2008.  His most recent post, The Mobile Historian proves this to be a blog worth watching. In an earlier post, Methodologies and the (Digital) History Major, In a response to a report drafted by Stanley N. Katz and James Grossman, Blevins takes a look at Katz and Grossman’s conclusions “through a digital lens.”   I particularly like his response to the assertion that:

The single most important contribution that training in history can make to the liberal learning of undergraduates is to help students to contextualize knowledge, offering an antidote to naive presentism.

Blevin’s writes:

One hallmark of the digital age is the ephemeral nature of information. Lacking the inherent stability and traditional gatekeeping of the analog era, it becomes more and more difficult to “pin down” knowledge. Without assurance that a website will exist tomorrow or next week or next year, knowledge and authority become much more fluid, and users will be even more inclinated towards presentism (whether naive or not). Historians will need to offer their skills in contextualizing and framing a constantly shifting corpus of information, at the very least in order to provide a sense of temporal perspective.

In Blevin’s statements, I find new connections between information literacy and historical study…and affirmation of my professional journey…as historian - turned librarian - turned educator.