Digital History & HGIS: Well Worth the Worry Lines
Picture this: it’s 7:30am on June 10, 2021. A young, energetic and full-of-life version of myself opens her laptop and signs into PAWS in hopes none of the classes she desires to register for are full yet. Through blurry eyes she scans through the planned schedule she meticulously curated over the previous few weeks. To the her displeasure, the Latin class she longed to take was being taught by an unfavorable professor, which in turn provoked a change of plans.
Scrolling through the list of senior level courses she was eligible to take a few different ones caught her eye. Perhaps still in a sleepy daze or a brief moment of pure insanity, she decided to choose a course titled “Mapping History” which was scheduled to be taught by one of her favorite professors. This moment marked the beginning of a semester full of mental breakdowns, hair-pulling frustration, and pure manic joy. Fast-forward a semester later and here I am, infected with the HGIS bug and ready to experiment. Despite Mapping History being one of the most challenging classes for me up to date, I truly believe that the class taught me an immeasurable amount of information and skills that I could not achieve anywhere else than the few select digital history courses offered at our university.
… How Do I Find Scholarly Articles Again?
Prior to this year of my post-secondary education, the only kind of digital history that I had been exposed to were that of information databases. The ones that I used most commonly were L’Anne philologique, JSTOR, and the University’s library ‘USearch‘ database. Both of these I only accessed and used when writing papers for classes and really never questioned how they worked or how I could make better use of them. Realistically, looking at these databases with a different set of knowledge and skills, I can see why I had such trouble with other bibliographic databases. I gave up looking for sources quite often when using databases like Academic Search Complete, Iter, and Project Muse mainly due to not understanding how to properly search for the kind of articles I wanted and being overwhelmed with the choices I could make. Looking at the university’s library research guides now I realize there is so much untapped information that I could have accessed with the simple click of a mouse. Before working with digital history I had no idea that I could access archival content through databases! That for one could have definitely saved me hours stressful and panicked searching for primary resources.
Challenging the Comfort Zone
As I’ve previously mentioned, my first digital history course last semester really opened my eyes to a whole different world of historical research. The main base of experience I have in this field is map making and georeferencing with the program QGIS, which is a free open source Geographic Information System that is available to anyone with an interest in this area of study. Beyond this, through the use of lessons and labs I was given the chance to learn a variety of basic skills which inevitably led towards a cumulative map-building final research project. Through this project I learned many hard lessons but also was given the absolute pleasure of seeing all my hard work, effort, and tears pay off.
The conclusion of Mapping History was bittersweet as I did not want to stop creating and experimenting. Alas, however, I was gifted with the opportunity to continue my education in digital history with this class the following semester. So far I have been astounded by the amount of information that I don’t know and I am very excited to keep challenging myself to step outside of my comfort zone and continue learning. One of the largest learning curves for me so far has been the transition from QGIS to ArcGIS, which I never would have thought to be so different. Overall, I think that over the majority of my university career I have not paid much attention to digital history, or rather, I have not been given many opportunities to explore this area that has peaked my interest over the past several months. I believe that it would be entirely beneficial for students that are entering the history department to have some basic knowledge on digital history and how it is changing the face of historical research everyday. As a student that has been exposed to this subject matter in their last year of university, I have to say, it was almost too late!