Reading the introduction of Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzwiegs’s Digital History has me jazzed up to be taking another continuing education course. Not only does the text have significant meaning for my current professional context but it has incredible and meaningful application amongst today’s political turmoil. Unfortunately, given the topic, I’m surprised the authors haven’t taken advantage of their digital publication and made updates to include current references that would further buttress their argument. I found that, although their points were insightful–and at times prophetic, their text is outdated with its 2005 publication.

Here are just three examples of additions that can be made from just the introduction:

Manipulability & Pattern matching –the ability to search through vast quantities of text for particular strings of words.

In 2010 the Library of Congress announced that every public tweet since Twitter’s founding in 2006 will be archived. During a personal visit in 2014, our docent noted that trends and viral hashtags, aka pattern matching, are being recorded and studied. Thankfully this means that today’s social justice campaigns, or as some call it “hashtag activism”, won’t be missed by tomorrow’s students of history. Viral hashtags, text search themselves, and viral #s like #kony2012 #blacklivesmatter #metoo and so many others are now one more piece of documented history to be studied and critiqued as students now do with documents such as the Dr. Seuss cartoon collection on war.

Interactivity the problems of quality and authenticity emerge, in part, out of the vast capacity of digital media. Often cyber-skeptics summarize this view in the simple phrase “it’s mostly junk.”“… “computers are good at yes and no and right and wrong, whereas historians prefer words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “it is more complicated than that.” 

A shift in the pedagogy of teaching history began in the early 2000s and was led in 2002 by the establishment of the Stanford Historical Education Group. SHEG was founded to address some of the concerns discussed in this introduction by offering framework and lessons for classroom teachers. SHEG laid the basis for classroom instruction with “Thinking like a Historian” and teaching “Beyond the Bubble”. Stanford helped teachers address the matter of “fake news” before there was “fake news” and give students the tools to weed out real information from the “mostly junk”.

Durability—“a second hazard on the road to digital history nirvana. The digital record of the federal government is being lost on a daily basis. Although most government agencies started using email and word processing software in the mid-1980s, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration still does not require that digital records be stored in their original form.”

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal alone would be an excellent example of this concern. Clinton’s emails and their subsequent role in the 2016 election would highlight this issue even more. I won’t delve into the matter here but the matter would be a worthy addition and reference to this section.

Conclusion I can’t wait to read the rest of Digital History and that’s not a statement often heard about an academic textbook. What I would like to see is a chapter added at the end, an update so to speak, where authors’ key points are viewed through a more up to date context.