How can we teach history in a way that builds a more complete (and thus, more accurate) understanding of events that remain close to home for the student or reader? The answer isn’t simple, but both Bauman and Nelson rely on shifts in perspective to lead the way.

The authors of Making Comics and Unflattening — two graphic books about pedagogy — argue that communicating with images is about more than making things easier for the reader: The act of illustrating reveals new insights to the creator, enabling a more profound exploration of the subject.

We as historians (as well as every rando on the internet!) have access to mountains of data, but many of us haven’t been trained in manipulating databases of the size and complexity we’re using. It can be challenging to find what we need in the proverbial haystack — and to interpret it correctly.

At the end of the 17th Century, half of the accused who appeared in the city’s Old Bailey courtroom were women. Then, that number declined drastically over the course of the 18th Century. Historians are obsessed with figuring out why. Were women committing fewer crimes? Or were they simply not being arrested? This podcast explores a single piece of that puzzle: How women’s own voices contributed to perceptions of women criminals.

That the U.S. nearly went to war with Great Britain over a pig seems, at first glance, like nothing more than a quirky history fact. As you peel back the layers, though, the San Juan Island Pig War story reveals much about 19th Century international relations. And like any worth tale involving pig slaughter, battleships, and strongly-worded letters, this story ends with a timeless moral lesson.

As Spider-Man — or was it Gandhi? — once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Equally accurate: with great meme skills come great responsibility. With increasingly-accessible digital data visualization tools, even a technically accurate map, graph, or infographic representing incomplete or manipulated data can appear trustworthy.

Sounds can work a bit like time travel. “Listening and the human voice, in particular, evoke place in visceral and profound ways,” writes Mark Tabeau, architect of the mobile publishing framework Curatescape and curator of its flagship project, Cleveland Historical. “Human voices call forth memory, time, and context.”. It is this kind of sensory connection that public historians now tap into when building digital histories of place.

Our first assignment for Intro to Historical Studies was to create a presentation on why we study history. I will be creating oral history podcasts for the Washington State Digital Archives this year as part of my grad student assistantship, so I chose to brush off my podcasting skills a bit and tell my story with audio only.

Every new iteration of digital networks emerges to solve a specific problem, whether military, scientific, commercial or educational (History of the Internet) — and then others adapt those innovations to suit their own needs. The field of digital humanities is no different.

I am Erika Prins Simonds, a Master’s student in the Public History program and a Graduate Student Assistant (GSA).