Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Future of Digital History

When I think of digital history I often wonder how on earth historians are going to muck through all the insurmountable stuff that's on the internet. "Stuff" is the only way I can describe the innumerable Facebook posts, instagram photos, tweets, snaps, screenshots, Periscopes (something I only learned about the other day), and any other debris and shrapnel of the battlefield of social media. That doesn't even include emails, internet ads, YouTube videos, or blog posts. What's important? Who decides? How will these things be saved?

Research will have to completely change if the topic covers anything to do with the Internet. There will have to be vast databases to hold all of the information. With the presence of databases must come a system of organization and classification. Hopefully search engines will be much more effective in the future to aid researchers.

One thing that concerns me about the future of digital history is how things will be saved. It may be easier to trace the Facebook posts and Tweets of important political figures, such as during this year's presidential race, but what of the average person? Diaries and letters exist from past generations, but what will be left from the Web 2.0 era? Too easily one can lose that article they remember reading, or that funny picture they once saw (don't even get me started on attributing credit to authors on the internet, it's near impossible in most cases). People change email addresses, delete old emails for storage space, and hyperlinks get broken as pages are moved or changed to make room for the new. Many times a conscious effort has to be made in order to save something online, and there must be a designated place to save it in its original form. Will mobile versions of websites also be saved? And phone apps?

One thing is for certain: the future of digital history will be very interesting as scholars try their hardest to keep up with the ever-evolving cybersphere.

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