Shoemaker, R.B. and Hitchcock, T. (2015) Making History Online. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 25. 75 - 93. ISSN 0080-4401
Abstract
This article considers the implications of recent innovations in digital history for the relationship between the academy and the public. It argues that while digitisation and the internet have attracted large new audiences, academic historians have been reluctant to engage with this new public. We suggest that recent innovations in academic digital history, such as the highly technocratic ‘Culturomics’ movement, have had the unintended effect of driving a wedge between higher education and the wider public. Similarly, academic history writing has been slow to embrace the possibilities of the internet as a means of dissemination and engagement; and academic publishing has moved even more reluctantly. Despite these issues, this article argues that the internet offers real opportunities for bridging the divide between the academy and a wider audience. Through non-traditional forms of publication such as blogging; through Open Access policies; and through new forms of visualisation of complex data, the digital and online allow us to present complex history to a wider audience. We conclude that historians need to embrace the ‘affordances’ and ‘disruptions’ posed by the internet to render the discipline more open and democratically accessible.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Royal Historical Society 2015. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series). Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 Nov 2015 15:10 |
Last Modified: | 21 Mar 2018 20:34 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0080440115000031 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0080440115000031 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:91516 |