VIRGINIA, 1999: EDWARD L. AYERS, THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW SITE AND THE BIRTH OF DIGITAL HISTORY
Digital history is a recent concept, first defined in 1999 by Edward L. Ayers, Dean of the University of Virginia, who created the first major website, The Valley of the Shadow, which reconstructs the history of a county in Virginia, divided between North and South during the civil war. In the site, you will find sources, historiography, interpretation of sources and historiography, maps, animations, documents obtained by the people of the county, in practice dominating what is on the net through the craft of the historian. Also significant is an extraordinary report from December 2012 (see Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians, Jennifer Rutner Roger C. Schonfeld, December 10, 2012, downloadable from Ithaka ) on the state of historical science in the USA, on who teaches, who studies, who does the research, who deals with libraries or archives and the users of the sites all that should be done to dominate the change.
NEW SOURCES FOR HISTORY: WEB HISTORY AND DIFFERENT RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES
Another aspect is the criticality of network content: an important source of the digital age is the website itself. You can make history with sites: the Web History, a new way of living the trade of the historian. There are tools to solve the problem of volatility, various languages etc. There is Internet archive the first archive of the network that since 1996 gives the next copies of websites from which you can see how it evolves such as a party, a government site, see the archived versions and make a critical edition. On sites, however, it is necessary to make some reflections: on Google sites are not indexed according to their value, or their content. It is the task of the educators, of those who teach, to provide the critical tools to make the choices.
INTERDISCIPLINARY NATURE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORICAL SCIENCE AND DIGITAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
In relation to Digital History, it is to the new discipline of Digital Humanities that we continue to invest in (Great Britain) because it still poses new methodological and epistemological questions of the transdiscipline: there is the idea of the humanistic subjects that bring together and combine different disciplines. Transdisciplinarity presupposes the possibility of developing the very tools of research and teaching and there are many faculties and departments that create and offer tools in open sources, software for teaching and learning. It is a high level, there is the opportunity to dominate the discipline also from within.
On the other hand, there must be aware users that they must have a knowledge of network content, different services and different resources locally and internationally.
Then there is another field, that of digital historiography, a new form of narration that today with the net takes different forms: writing with videos and images in combination is now multimedia and all this multimedia becomes a way of telling the story, becomes historiography.
Digital History still includes digital native sources and metaphors, i.e. a whole patrimony of archival and library sources that are progressively put on the web, not only at the level of the catalogue but also at increasingly analytical levels up to digitization. Google has 60 million books to access and has recently made an agreement with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, for which it is digitizing thousands of books under the control of librarians.
Finally, we find the techniques and software that can be used for pedagogical activities and learning.
PUBLIC HISTORY: A STRUCTURED DISCIPLINE AIMED AT COMMUNICATING HISTORY TO SELECTED AUDIENCES
There is an area in which digital history and history tout court can have a form of fusion, Public History, improperly translated into Italian with the expression public use of history with a strong connotation of political instrumentalization. In 2011, the magazine Memoria e Ricerca dedicated a monographic issue on public history, as a discipline without a name.
However, Public History is a structured discipline (Serge Noiret is the president of the first international federation of Public History) with 34 years of experience in the United States. He is a master of techniques, of the particular information to make history outside the universities. It involves the scientific training of all the people who have a relationship with history (museums, libraries, archives, etc...) who must master the historical science to bring it to society, to chosen and different publics, each with its own specificity, such as students, local communities or communities around an institute. Public History is to think about the didactic passage towards the chosen public. Like Public Archeology, Public History highlights the willingness of people to participate, know and interact with those who have the knowledge, offering new, unprecedented prospects for dissemination.