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This course introduces digital history technologies, from the well-established such as document preservation and geographic information systems, to the exotic and future-oriented such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. This course is broken up into a series of lessons, with material presented to introduce each topic, discuss how it is useful to historians, and demonstrate how to begin using it. There may be activities to learn and gain practice with the technology.

Each person has a different level of experience and comfort with technologies. Further, each person has different areas of familiarity with particular technologies, regardless of their general level of technical know how. So this course covers technology basics, but there are also some Leveling Up activities that are more challenging that serve as the entrance to delving deeper into these areas.

There will be Recommended Reading to help you learn about particular support technologies. If you already know those areas, feel free to skip those readings. Finally, there may be Resources and Further Reading, to help you learn more about the topic or complete the activities.

Working with technology is not completely easy for anyone. Even the most savvy programmers spend considerable time web searching for more information or solutions when things don’t work. While it is best to start learning from curated materials such as those on this site, web searches can help fill the gaps.

Finally, remember that you don’t have to be able to figure out everything in this course to benefit from it. Mere familiarity with what these technologies are and why they are important can start bringing you benefits from them and help you shape your strategy for using digital technologies. You can then later focus on what you really need to learn to accomplish your objectives.

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COURSE | What Is Digital Technology and How Historians Can Use It? »