Session 6: transitioning forward

Cohen and Rosenzweig, chapters 7, 8, and conclusion

• What is Creative Commons? What are its implications for scholarship?
• What is copyright? How does copyright protect you, frustrate you, as a historian? What is fair use?
• How are sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc., dealing with copyright and images?
• How do you feel about copyright? Alternatives? Is open access an alternative?
• Copyright is a big complicated mess. If you were creating a digital history project, for a class, say, what should you do: 1) about copyrighting the project and 2) about any primary sources you wanted to include?
• What are the takeaways from this chapter for you?
• Should we seriously worry that historical study will be impossible in the future?

Kelly, chapter 5 and conclusion

• Do we agree with Kelly’s implicit suggestion that digital history = online history?
• Do you want your professors to add online components to your classes? What if the cost is reduced skills that are the traditional goals of graduate classes, like close reading, analysis, and understanding of the past?
• “While historians might be tempted to scoff at such mash-ups and remixes as ahistorical or simply silly, the popularity of such work cannot be denied.” Is this a good argument? Where does “popularity” fit into history professors’ goals?
• Are we content to do “thought experiments” such as the Tank Man video Kelly discusses?
• What do you think of the “Lying about the Past” course?
• Given the intentionality of the hoax, let’s revisit how we know whether to trust online sources.
• Given how long things last on the internet (long or short?), was it a reasonable assumption that the class could really “take down” the hoax at the end of the class?
• Idea of “zombie facts”
• How can you give grades in a course like Lying about the Past?
• What do you think of the decision of the GMU department that Kelly could not continue to teach the Lying about the past class?

Questions for going forward

• What do we know now about how to think about digital history that we didn’t know at the start of the semester? What questions do we have now that we did not formerly have?
• Let’s try to construct the steps you need to build a Digital History project
• Brainstorm possible projects and paper questions