In The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook, Sheila A. Brennan defines digital history as “an approach to researching and interpreting the past that relies on computer and communication technologies to help gather, quantify, interpret, and share historical materials and narratives” (p. 1). Technology can open new doors in analyzing patterns in our data and give us new ways to visualize those patterns. Technology makes it easier and more convenient for historians to work on collaborative projects and to reach a larger audience. According to Brennan, the most important benefit of using digital tools is that we can “access and share marginalized or silenced voices and … incorporate them into our work in ways not possible in print or the space of an exhibition gallery” (p. 1). This statement holds important meaning for me: in anthropology, making sure that multiple voices and perspectives are heard, especially by marginalized groups, is an integral part of research design.

Andrew Hurley states in his article Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide that “riding the fast-moving digital bandwagon is not without its risks and costs” (p. 70). From the high costs of software and hardware to new training for humanities scholars, much extra time and money must be invested in order to operate successfully in “the new media” environment. The time and funding to do this might not be available to smaller institutions or groups. It is also important to remember that people’s access to digital tools and information may vary greatly based on socioeconomic status: this has been termed “the digital divide” (pp. 70-71). Low-income, inner-city populations are often unable to fully engage with digital media and technology.

Hurley describes the creation of the Virtual City Project in 1999, a collaborative online project through UMSL where users may access 3-D imaging and mapping technologies (such as Google Earth) to create electronic representations of lost St. Louis historic landscapes, such as the Lucas Place and Riverfront neighborhoods. Users can also create their own 3-D cities and link both text and images to landscape features. Project designers hoped that it would be well-utilized by North St. Louis residents in the featured neighborhoods, but the “digital divide” became apparent: the website and blog were effective in marketing the neighborhoods to outside audiences, but less useful for outreach within them. Many North City homes did not have computers or Internet access. Even with a computer, accessing the project’s software was not user-friendly to those without more advanced technological skills. Old-fashioned outreach methods such as distributing flyers and hosting community outreach events were able to publicize the project more effectively.

In the case of making oral histories more accessible, author Michael Frisch writes in his chapter of Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World that he believes digital tools can “liberate oral history from constraints that until recently have, paradoxically, rendered the recordings that define the method largely unreachable and underutilized in all but a few corners of documentary and public history practice” (p. 126). Frisch explains the concept of “shared authority” in public history: it is an interpretive and meaning-making process between historians and a larger public audience (p. 127). Frisch’s “digital kitchen” begins with “raw” source materials such as transcribed oral histories and is transformed by scholars, curators, and other specialists into a “well-cooked, receivable presentation” fed to the public (pp. 129-130). However, not every “cook” may interpret raw materials for public presentation (such as exhibits) in the same way, and this is where problems arise. Frisch’s idea is to make the raw materials accessible to the public in a user-friendly way, so that everyone can play the role of cook in interpreting the information themselves. This may not be a simple task, but I believe it would be a step in the right direction.