Module 1 is intended to create a foundation for you to build upon for the rest of the course. The readings and discussion will give you a basic understanding of what digital history is and why the digital matters to all historians in our current era. The technical activities will help you establish control of your online (scholarly) presence and set up some basic infrastructure you will need for various portions of this course, including your course blog.
Readings/Discussion:
1. read Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas, “What is Digital History,” May 2009
2. explore the websites of the past recipients of the Roy Rosenzweig Prize from the AHA
3. read EITHER Adam Crymble, Technology and the Historian (University of Illinois Press, 2021) OR read the intro, conclusion, and a few reviews of Adam Crymble’s book (this is a real choice; I recognize that we meet on the first day of classes!)
4. prepare to participate in the class discussion on “what is digital history? how are computers and the internet transforming (or not) historical research more generally?”
Technical Activities (Required):
1. BEFORE CLASS, sign up for the class Slack (you should receive an emailed invitation)
2. ASAP BEFORE CLASS, purchase a Reclaim Hosting shared-hosting account (the $36 personal level should be more than sufficient for your needs). Make sure “ID Protection” is selected when you register your domain name, to hide your personal information from spammers. Also, be sure to confirm your email or halfway through the semester you will lose log-in access to your account and have to deal with tech support to get it back.
I recommend that you spend the additional $19 to get a custom domain name; alternatively, you can create your websites on subdomains of the Reclaim Hosting URL. You can use any domain name you desire, but most people use some variant of “yourname.com” or “yourname.org” for their professional portfolio website (mine is jessicaotis.com and 2026hist696.jessicaotis.com is a subdomain of that domain).
If you wait too late to create your new domain, GMU’s campus internet may temporarily block access to your domain. If this happens to you during class, the problem should automatically resolve in a few days.
3. BEFORE CLASS, begin to familiarize yourself with the interface of your Reclaim Hosting account – this help page will be useful for you
4. during class we will set up your WordPress instance through Reclaim Hosting (instructions can be found here, be sure to use https not http) and create a website for your class blog and academic portfolio; check out this WordPress tutorial and customize your WordPress instance as desired. At minimum, I highly recommend installing a security plugin (I use Solid Security Basic) and an accessibility plugin (I use WP Accessibility)
5. during class we will practice making blog posts and commenting on each other’s blogs, to ensure you are comfortable with this type of assignment and choose the correct level of permissions necessary for you to easily post comments every week
Technical Activities (Optional):
6. get a password manager so that you can easily create and use strong, unique passwords for your course accounts and everything else you might make online accounts for. Options include LastPass, Keeper Security, 1Password, and more.
7. set up an ORCID account and obtain a unique identifier that you can use to help disambiguate yourself and your publications from other people with similar names.
8. set up other professional profiles if/as desired, e.g. at Humanities Commons, Google Scholar, and the department website (PhD students). Note: Academia.edu is a bit spammy and is a non-educational group squatting on a .edu domain name so I no longer recommend signing up there.
9. do a Google search for your name and its variants. Set to private any accounts and remove any content you wouldn’t want your future supervisor or a hiring committee to have access to. By the end of the semester, you should see your new professional profiles popping up as top search hits – that’s what you want people to find when they search for you online