Session Abstract

Over the course of the past fifteen years historians have witnessed the growth of new digital tools and techniques applied to the humanities. Digital history as a genre of historical practice has introduced the potential to change how research is conducted, scholarship is communicated, and our audiences increased dramtically. Training in the methods of digital history allows historians to approach their research with a new set of tools and to present historical arguments through digital media to communicate their interpretations. This panel will illustrate the possibilities, opportunities, and challenges digital historians face by examining the conception, development, and use of digital history in the course of a semester-long graduate seminar. The participants will comment on the research tools, the building process, and the value of an end product from the perspective of having created digital historical scholarship in a recent graduate seminar. Each of the presentations will contribute to an understanding of the issues that the presenters experienced in a digital history seminar and demonstrate the value of expanding the methodological toolkit of the historian to include digital tools for both research and scholarly communication.