By way of Dan Cohen’s blog, I discovered Bill Turkel’s list of nearly 100 books relevant to digital history. The meme is a comps reading list for an imaginary digital history sub-field. I was psyched to see geographic history and GIS for history getting plenty of coverage, and python too!
I’m ashamed that I wasn’t subscribed to Bill’s blog feed until this morning.
I too am awed by the beauty of the Turkel list. But I wonder: is digital history an “imaginary sub-field”?
Woops! Didn’t mean to imply that I thought either “history of things digital” or “computational approaches to historical research” were in any way not _real_. I had the impression Bill was creating a reading list for a departmental subfield that doesn’t exist at his institution — one he was therefore imagining …
We do have a graduate course in digital history now, but haven’t yet had a PhD student do a field in the subject. There’s lots of interest, so who knows? Even though I was never a Boy Scout, I like to be prepared.
I’m not sure if digital history will be a separate field as/when it emerges, a recognized approach to history, or part of a larger digital humanities. I imagine it will get institutionalized different ways in different places, like STS.