Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the
Past on the Web provides for the first time a plainspoken and thorough
introduction to the web for historians--teachers and students,
archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur
enthusiasts--who wish to produce online historical work or to build upon
and improve the projects they have already started in this important new
medium.
The book takes the reader step by step through planning a project,
understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the
appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy to use and
scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly
while preserving their historical integrity, and reaching and responding
to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions
of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age and examines
more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites
that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts.
Finally, the book provides basic guidance for ensuring that the digital
history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years.
Throughout, Digital History maintains a realistic sense of the
advantages and disadvantages of putting historical documents,
interpretations, and discussions online.
The authors write in a tone that makes Digital History accessible to
those with little knowledge of computers, while including a host of
details that more technically savvy readers will find helpful. And
although the book focuses particularly on historians, those working in
related fields in the humanities and social sciences will also find this
to be a useful introduction. Digital History builds upon more than a
decade of experience and expertise in creating pioneering and
award-winning work by the Center for History and New Media at George
Mason University.
