September 3 Post
My contribution to the group document was providing the intial definition for flexibility which came from the text written by Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen. I first included a word for word definition as provided by the text, and then gave my own summary of how the two authors see the word, flexibility, relative to digital history. While doing this assignments I thought that having this be a group work allows me and others to view other people’s work, so that we can see how they formatted their contribution and use it to help us.
Thanks, Phillip. Excellent point about learning from how your classmates formatted their contribution. That’s one of the goals of this assignment: to get us to think creatively not just about the content of digital history, but also the way in which that content is presented. In fact, those things are related in ways we’ll try to tease out over the course of the semester.
Regarding “flexibility,” you could push this definition further. Because it’s now easier to recover and preserve the variety of media produced in the past, it’s easier to deploy that media in a diverse way in support of historical argument. Even since Dan and Roy wrote this book, we’ve seen the emergence of mobile devices which both deepen our ability to document the things happening around us, to interact with our surroundings, and to present historical analysis in a flexible way.
Keep this concept in mind over the course of the semester-