"U will live 4eva in my heart": History and Hypertextuality

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

selections from Intersections: History and New Media

Virginia Heffernan, "Haunted Mouses," New York Times (16 December 2007)

Nate Hill, "Hyperlinking Reality," Library Journal (July 2009)

Center for the Future of Museums, "Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures"

Each of the above readings are primarily interested in two concerns:

1) How can historicans utilize increasingly sophisticated technology, whether doing traditional scholarship or public-oriented work?

and

2) When using this new digital tool box, where do you locate the nexus of democratizaton and fragmentation/ corporatization (what Heffernan calls "static")?

With respect to the first question, Cohen and Rosenzweig and the CFM report make a compelling case for the need to embrace these tools. As Cohen and Rosenzweig lay out, the web opens a plethora of opportunities for young and seasoned historians, among them accessibility, flexibility, and interactivity. Likewise CFM demonstrates the need to respond NOW to changing demographics, a turbulent political economy, an even more turbulent fiscal economy, and the sea change that has occurred across modes of communication. Museums need to embrace Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, and begin to develop a language that thinks beyond its traditional audience (One of the report's most telling pieces of data: minorities now represent roughly a third of the total US population, and yet minorities at historic sites represent only around 9% of total visitation).

Nate Hill and a number of the short selections from the AHA Perspectives forum (Intersections: History and Digital Media) provide some examples of what this new work can and will look like. With the use of something called QR codes, bar codes that can be read by a mobile device, Hill imagines the meeting place between "[his] online community and [his] physical community." With the use of QR codes, one can turn nearly any physical setting into a collectively maintained Facebook profile, each passerby offering "status updates" about their own reflections on that space, new information that might otherwise be lost on other visitors, responses to previous inhabitants. Hill uses the example of a park bench. A bench equipped with a QR code could become a portal between digital and physical communities, essentially an online profile that anyone with access to QR readability can "write" throughout the day. A number of the authors featured in Intersections share success stories with digital mapping technology and the relatively cheap opportunities it provide for interactive online content. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, brought to our attention here by co-editor Janice Reiff, is a particularly impressive example (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/).

Truthfully, it all makes your head spin a bit. But whether we like it or not, this is the future of communication. Cohen and Rosenzweig are wise to bring readers to the attention of the dangers as well as the benefits of digital history. But it is no longer our job to debate those terms. We simply have to keep an open mind, maybe take a class or two on HTML, and learn how to interpret the "static."

A QR code (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668443.html?&rid=)