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Making history online

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 22:40 authored by Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker
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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

ISSN

0080-4401

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Volume

25

Page range

75-93

Department affiliated with

  • History Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-10-05

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2015-10-05

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