Lincoln's Future Is Digital –Deal With It!

I cant see why anyone would disagree with you digital technology has already taken over just about everything why not in the class room?

One of the more interesting aspects of Prof. Pinsker’s essay was the contrast between the digital revolution and the effects photography had on the 19th century art world. Photographic clarity led to abstract art, but historical clarity (via new digital tools) enables us to learn with greater precision and specificity.

As someone who, like many of my generation, has vaguely learned and relearned aspects of American history, I find digital tools an interesting and useful reprieve from traditional educational approaches. While I prefer reading from books, researching is without a doubt made easier with full text search and other digital tools. Furthermore, the internet provides novices like me an outlet to voice my historical interpretations/opinions. I can now use blogs or contribute to forums for example. In the past it seems to me like the historical field was more exclusive – research and findings were published in scholarly books and articles. While the digital approach is of course a double edged sword (because it enables people to propagate potentially false information) it ultimately provides for more direct link to education.

As far as I’m concerned new techs can only enhance learning. Until very recently just about the only way to acquire historical knowledge was to read books (a task that people are finding increasingly daunting these days). Although I have no problem with books, I find that they rarely bring history to life as it should be. Technology does not just provide access to more information, it creates useful ways of viewing/thinking about it. For example, relevant insights can be gained from tools like the word cloud or the historical tours on google earth. Digital possibilities for history are expansive, even though they may not always lead to revisionism. Like most other subjects, history will have to adapt to digital trends to stay accessible (and relevant). Just as newspapers didn’t die with the advent of radio and radio didn’t die with the advent of tv, books aren’t going anywhere just because info is available online. Digital history will contribute to a more vibrant discussion, but will not destroy other more traditional medium.

Digital resources are extremely useful because they allow material to be presented in interesting ways that traditional mediums,like books and articles, cannot portray. Digital materials are also important for history because they allow primary and secondary sources to be widely and easily accessed. The interactive essay from the Lincoln materials was very useful and interesting. This is because the interactive essay expanded on the ideas in the text by providing links to relevant information. I believe that material like this is one of the best ways to utilize digital content because it allows easy access to different forms of information that supplement the text.

Digital resources are key in doing research on a small subject of a broad topic. The internet allows for a person to find many sources relating to a sometimes seemingly irrelevant small detail. The only downside I see to digital resources is that people will be more and more driven to use only the internet and not books (which may not be in a digital form), so they would be missing out on some information that could be crucial to their research because they are relying solely on the internet.

I believe that these digital resources make research faster, and therefore more efficient. The word cloud effect for the Lincoln-Douglas Debates is a prime example. Through this program any person can find out which words were said the most during each of the debates. From there, a person can then locate the most important words in the debates and view them in the context in which they were used. Researching the traditional way by reading the content and then meticulously highlighting every time slave or slavery was said is very slow process. Now, researchers can quickly find the major words said and then interpret them in the context and issues of the period. The word cloud is just one of many examples of digital resources that can help make researching faster and more effective.

I am very traditional in regards to historical research and find much of my fascination with history arises out of the independence and liberty that the research process generates. With the materials not so easily at hand, one has to establish their own path in researching—filtering through tertiary sources, scholarly works, and then primary sources—to formulate an individual thesis and argument. As an undergraduate so-called historian-in-the-making, I am attracted to the conventional methods of the research process, but I do understand that, as Catherine Clinton stated, “we are in a period of transition.”
As such, like everyone else, historians must bear to manage the change directly. In a positive light, digitizing documents make research easier and faster, as well as less financially burdensome (take, for example, the interactive essay and the full-text recollections). Furthermore, with the developing technology, such graphs and maps—like the hypergraph, timemap, and word cloud—can be created to instigate new insight on a seemingly exhausted topic (for example, the word cloud technology sheds light on the significance of word usage in various documents). Even though this technological evolution is unavoidable and historians must be prepared for it, I still find the apparently “dated” method of historical research essential.
I am not against amateur historians, but easy access to materials can undeniably allow almost anyone to voice their perspective on a topic—the gradations of education may then become democratized. Moreover, although I advocate Professor Pinsker’s immense efforts to adapt to this global transformation in technology, I agree with Professor Holt on a criticism of Pinsker’s outlook: “Pinsker seems to believe that fresh and compelling interpretations of Lincoln depends on as-yet-unrecovered evidence rather than on rethinking what we already know, even though we may not have looked at the already available information as closely as we should have.”

Lincoln’s future is digital? Of course it is…but then again everything is. The rapid rise of technology and its prevalence in modern society makes it impossible to say otherwise; denying the fact that history, or anything else, is moving towards the digital age is simply ignorant. I believe what is most important is that the stigma of technology use for academic purposes will eventually fall. Yes, Wikipedia is still a source unfit to use in academic purposes, but I truly think that it, or something similar, has the potential to become a respected source in academia. Web 2.0 concepts are strange, yes, but effective, and putting research on Lincoln into the same context can only help the field.
The most important aspect of this digitization is the accessibility it gives to the common person. Yes, some may claim that allowing everyone access to the entirety of Lincoln research will water down the field. Again it would be ignorant to ignore the voices of non-professional historians; the study of Lincoln can only benefit from the views of many people, and truly the best way to do so is to create digital resources that all can use easily. I truly do commend Prof. Pinsker and others like him for working to advance his field…without him, the study of Lincoln, and history in general, would be left in the dust.

Digital resources have become key to doing research and in the classroom as an aide. The only negative to using digital resources is that it takes away from the use of books, which have been our resources for so many years in the past. However it is always good to improve and increase the accessability of information so moving in this direction of the digital is benefical.

Digital media is going to be really big in near future. And the boom of internet is primary reason behind this phenomenon. Although the traditional marketing will not die but the application of the traditional media will surely change.