Wow everyone, I’ve officially made it to the end of my Spring 2026 semester at UMW, and it’s time to decide – have I officially earned the title of Digital Historian?
Before we get into that, let’s recap some of my thoughts on what I’ve learned this semester!
Lessons Learned from Adventures in Digital History
Taking this course for me was yes to fulfill a 400 level class requirement for my major, but after completing the digital project in my course with Dr. McClurken last semester, I developed a greater interest and appreciation for digital history projects, and when I heard he’d be teaching this class I saw it as an opportunity to expand on that interest. As I mentioned in one of my first few posts, I’m not, the most tech savvy person, so I was a bit nervous to see if I would be the weak link in my group or that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up. But I soon realized digital history doesn’t mean you have to have a PhD in coding in order to produce good work.
I learned a lot of skills from map making to making websites accessible to how to account for project partner and audience needs. I think this course not only taught me a lot of skills to do projects and not only did I gain an appreciation for the disciple, but I learned a lot about myself, what I find rewarding when I’m working on a project, and by the end of the project, although it was different than what I dreamed up when my group and I first started working on it, I felt a sense of fulfillment knowing that at least in some way and to some degree I helped people either learn more about history in Fredericksburg and helped the CRHC feel more confident with their social media outreach.
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what all of us working in history want? At least for myself, and this could be my teacher-self talking, I think want makes historic work important is that it gets people talking about the world around them and understand the events and people that have shaped the way the world works and the way we think today. So although I don’t know if I made a groundbreaking discovery while doing this project, I can say with confidence that I added to someone’s as well as my own experience and understanding of history through the work I did in this class.
Am I Officially a Digital Historian? Vote in the Comments Below!
In all seriousness, I really did enjoy this course and what it taught me about digital history. I think some of my favorite conversations we had were about things like AI or Wikipedia, I guess just things in general that people outside of history engage with on a more regular basis rather than the scholarly, academic works within the scope of the field. I think that what I really appreciate about digital history is that in my opinion it sometimes takes into account more so than scholarly works, like books or journals, the audience experience and the audience’s level of engagement and background knowledge when creating the project. I think it also in that similar vein have… dare I say… more of an impact on society more generally because these projects are used by let’s be honest more people, especially people who aren’t THAT into history, on a regular basis compared to a book that to be frank only people genuinely really interested in that topic will pick up. And this is not to say that scholarly work has no real impact, in fact I think that scholarly work is quite relevant and extremely important work and the ability to think critically and express an argument are skills that some of us tend to be lacking. What I’m trying to say is digital history is just as important and significant as traditional scholarly work in the sense that it does carry so much weight in that it touches so many people.
Today we were talking about in our final discussion is digital historians are historians, and I would say yes, absolutely! If you are making a genuine, thoughtful contribution to the understanding of a historic event or the study of history itself, then you are a historian. And is that a bit of a broad statement or inclusion, yeah maybe, but I think that even the bad that comes with broadening our definitions of history, historic research, or historians in general (meaning the false information or AI slop that gets put out) still raises conversations and thus contributing to our understanding of history and the field of history. And that may be a hot take, or maybe a little too optimistic, but what fun is studying anything if you want to put super tight parameters around it that can’t ever be questioned or challenged? I’m not saying anything and everything can thus be true, correct, or the best course of action, but if you take away anything from what I’ve said I hope it’s that the joy of history, or studying anything in life, is the process of learning, and learning means asking questions, challenging what we already know and understand, and we will be learning our whole entire lives, and that’s beautiful. The world is constantly changing and progressing, why should our understandings or definitions of all things not change with it?
