In the course of twenty years of work experience related to teaching and libraries, in the field of digital history, Serge Noiret offers an overview of the profound changes that have affected historical science and its dissemination.
To understand what has changed, we can make a comparison with what is happening at the political level, as the network is making a change that Public History has known for 12 years: from when the web has gone to 2.0 and has become participatory, politics is becoming the politics of everyone. Roy Rosenzweig (Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Virginia), one of the fathers of digital history, wrote that the web allows the history of everyone.
The professional dimension of history and politics is increasingly delegated to people: those who deal with history and politics are in a position to necessarily ask themselves the question of having the professional capacity to dominate change.
The dimension of change is impressive if you choose to stay out of what digital offers, you can not understand the world, running the risk of losing contact with the new generations, who are immersed in a different culture. In schools there is a break between a new world and a past world that is always present and teaches, that has power, possesses the contents of communication and the possibility of still dictating the forms of teaching.
THE ADVENT OF THE DIGITAL TURN AND THE NEED TO DOMINATE THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR HISTORY
With the advent of digital, we are therefore living a new quenelle of the ancient and modern, which is not only the prerogative of the Italian province, is also present in the United States, where the reflection is at a different stage than Italy and the Digital History has 10 years more experience. In the U.S. research institutes, there is a very heated debate to reflect on the nature of digital history, to propose new technologies, access to funding. The American historical associations, starting with the American Historical Association, are struggling with important internal discussions on the ability to use and dominate new technologies to make history.
This change can be defined as a digital turn that has led historians to a deep epistemological reflection, comparable to the epochal one of the late nineteenth century, which focused on the tools of historical science. A text, Atlas of European Historiography, is available (see Atlas of European Historiography. The Making of a Profession, 1800-2005. Edited by Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2010), which maps all these changes in Europe under the pressure of national historiography, archives, all the cultural heritage that involved the process of nation-building, but also the construction of the historical craft. Exactly a century later, with the advent of digital and the birth of the web (the web was born in 1991 from an intuition of Bernes Lee, but only in 1995-'96 the major universities have websites) there is a shift from paper catalogs of libraries to digital, a first major change in the way of thinking about the contact with research and sources. The ways of accessing and approaching the tools that we can find on the web today are changing, offering new opportunities for research and teaching. The great ideologies that accompanied the post-war history, that made the history of political parties, are left in the background to rethink the tools.
THE DIGITISATION OF THE ARCHIVAL AND LIBRARY HERITAGE FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH: OPPORTUNITIES AND PROBLEMS
What do we find on the net? Gino Roncaglia, (University of Viterbo) is the first to put a manual on the net since the beginning of 2000. The first example of the networking of information determines the emergence of the problem of filtering this mass of information that can be used at various levels: teaching, research, writing, source coding, the structuring of the material we have in our cultural institutions. The difference between an archive, a library and a museum is progressively narrowing
There is also free information on the web, with which we come into contact almost immediately, which is not indexed, which poses many problems but which should not be treated for this reason. Then there is information that is taken care of by cultural operators, which is enriched by metadata. It is the knowledge that allows access to knowledge and it is what is called the semantic web, which thanks to data on data, allows us to put together professions such as museum operators, archivists and librarians. These professions are all found together in a project such as Europeana, which allows converging the European knowledge digitized, a very advanced project that is also trying to achieve in the U.S. but that does not yet exist.
However, digital documentation has a number of characteristics that must be taken into account, such as, for example, the loss of authenticity. Moreover, while analog material has a tangible consistency, digital material can be born-digital, or a scan of analog material, that is, as it has been defined in the debate between medievalists, a meta source or metaphor. In the transition to digital and in the further steps of the digitized material, there is an inevitable loss of integrity. Then there is a loss of identity, there is volatility, but it is less than you think, because a computer document always leaves a trace on the network and can often be found, which is not possible in case of loss of analog documents. All these features do not highlight critical issues in order to give a negative connotation to digital documentation, but they must be known and dominated.
to be continued in the next part https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d878dc58d5b5f00ad32ca96/how-history-changes-in-the-digital-age-part-2-5d8f5f29a660d700ae013c02