Writing History in a Digital Age

A history professor reflects:

From one point of view, the new digital libraries represent an immense democratization of knowledge, since any student in any high school or community college can now access as many books online as students and professors at the most elite institutions were once uniquely privileged to possess on their campuses. One can now search and read books online that even a decade ago weren’t nearly as accessible even at institutions lucky enough to own them—and no institution owned them all.

From another point of view, though, there is much to worry about in this picture. Longstanding legal and intellectual traditions of fair use and public domain access that have been absolutely essential to scholarship are being eroded in ways that few anticipated. Even the ability of historians to quote from primary documents is more at risk today than ever before, with the possibility that significant swathes of the historical record may essentially become privatized at the very moment when open access seemed about to triumph.

More worrisome still, the very act of reading is undergoing such subtle and sweeping changes that it’s hard to know what it will look like 10 or 20 years from now. Not only are readers gaining more and more of their “content” via screens rather than paper; they are doing so in ever smaller and more fragmented bites that undermine the richly contextualized interpretations and narratives of traditional history writing. When I reflect on how little time my students now spend reading books—indeed, how much less time I devote to such reading than when I was younger—I worry that the human ability to navigate book-length texts may be diminishing in ways that could have worrisome consequences for the long-form prose we historians cherish.

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