I also wonder how far my fellow historians really grasp that history is very much a humanities discipline inasmuch as it is about how we relate to the world around us, and a history degree, like any other humanities subject, should transform how we relate to the world around us just as the other humanities do, or should do.

Then again, I suspect that the majority of historians are social scientists, and not very warm to narrative history or digital humanities

As for the AHA, well, every year I teach the Thursday before and the Monday after, in Ireland, so I’m going to have to do some digital magic myself to ever get there

Mike

There are panels on contemporary topics like virtual worlds, computer games, and Obama’s rhetoric, for example. Similarly, though there are certainly people in literature doing archivally based work, literary studies do tend to rely more on published work than historical studies do, and digitization has so far made more progress with published than with unpublished sources. I wonder if this has been a spur to the authorship panels.

In contrast, the history panels are more heavily weighted towards methods or are on the subject of scholarship itself (though I suppose this could simply be an effect of small sample size). The encouraging thing is that at some point those now contemporary MLA topics will start being taken up by historians, at which point they’ll have to pay attention to digital media – it’s where their sources will be.

On another note – and I’m hesitant to generalize here as I’ve been out of history for a few years – but historians do seem to use digital (or digitized) sources as if they were just like those in older formats, without reflecting on how they differ. And at the level of reading an individual source all the way through, the computer screen does not seem that different from a microfilm reader screen (or even paper). But the search technologies and techniques that lead to those sources are something new, as are the processes that put them online. I suppose this is just a long way of saying that I wish I could attend the google panel at AHA. Is anyone planning to put it on youtube or somewhere similar?