by For my blog post, I was presented with two questions that I could answer. Through much thought and consideration, I wanted to answer how digital tools have made it easier to teach about and help our audience engage with the past. Throughout human history, everything was written down and passed around with physical copies. Getting these scholarly materials must’ve been a nightmare, especially when it came to finding the materials, translating them, storing them, and then utilizing it in your work before having to repeat the process over and over again. However, it does beg the question to how digital tools have helped.
For digital tools, the effect it has in the history community is massive. Research materials of all kind can be distributed across the globe and stored digitally for anyone to use. When it comes to translation, the interconnectedness of the globe can make it easy for historians to translate any material and redistribute it for someone else to use. Platforms like Internet Archive have been pivotal in the storage of digital scholarly materials of all kinds, where anyone can find what they’re looking for. Search boxes make finding what you’re looking for faster, especially in places like JSTOR and HathiTrust. On top of that, digital programs like Omeka make it easy to create digital exhibits for students and historians to display their work globally.
It’s also important to keep in mind that keeping someone engaged is just as important as putting something on a computer. Educational curriculums across the world have begun to implement history lessons on digital media that keep their audiences engaged. YouTube channels like Crash Course provide free content that covers topics most people would find either boring or bias. Museums have also implemented interactive exploration that can have the user feel immersed in their historical experience. This can especially be seen in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., where their second floor has a wide variety of interactive exhibits that range from dancing to travel to historical objects. Video games and cinema have also targeted audiences who are both intrigued or disinterested with history. Whether you are playing Assassin’s Creed or watching the 12 Years a Slave, their usage of history displays accurate moments of history with some dramatizations to captivate their audiences.
In conclusion, the idea of engagement in digital media stems to a few factors. One such factor is interactivity, as the success that comes with keeping your audience engage will help them learn and retain more information. The second factor focuses on ease of use. People don’t like when things are complicated, so keeping digital tools and programs simple and effective is pivotal to keeping your audience engaged. Lastly, digital tools help promote creativity in a field that originally lacked it. By growing its branches beyond pen and paper, the global digital connection provides an endless stream of fun and engage ideas for individuals to learn and teach history.
