In these visionary essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media
on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding
history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion
technological breakthroughs and the "digitalskeptics" who fear the end
of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions academic
historians' practices and professional rites while analyzing and
advocating for amateur historians' achievements.
While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig
eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative
strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the
increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the
unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws
attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the
availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the
attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners.
Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences,
Rosenzweig also argues that we can only ensure the future of the past in
this digital age by actively resisting the efforts of corporations to
put up gates and profit from the Web.