Review: <i>A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles</i>, by Jennifer Guiliano

Abstract

A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles expands our understanding of the ways in which historical content and methods, along with digital technology, can impact learning outcomes in the history classroom.It is a key resource for historians as well as humanities scholars looking to include digital history methods in their curriculum.It is also a useful book for more experienced digital scholars who want to update their curriculum and include new approaches and historical questions.Drawing on contemporary digital history syllabi, the book provides examples of classroom assignments and details how they relate to historical content, methods, technologies, and historical thinking learning outcomes.The book shares numerous web-based resources, digital tools, examples of datasets, readings, and digital history projects, along with political and ethical considerations on history-making and digital technologies.It argues that digital history is defined by the specific historical questions and contexts that each historian seeks to understand and which audiences they wish to reach.While some historians are interested in scholarly publishing and storytelling, others approach the field through digital archives and collections and public dissemination of historical knowledge.Other historians are interested in crunching datasets with robust computational power and statistical models.The book offers a variety of approaches that historians can use to integrate the digital into their pedagogical practices, from introducing students to new forms of scholarly publishing or having them explore digital archives and collections to incorporating data analysis with complex computational models into their course design.In this sense, the book understands historical research and pedagogy as a public-facing activity that includes memory institutions.Digital history is created by professional historians but also by cultural heritage professionals in archives, libraries, and museums.The author showcases her deep experience with digital history curriculum development and invites us to consider the relationship of digital media and computation to historical thinking.The book is organized into three parts.The first part, "Foundations," introduces the basics of digital history teaching in comparison with the analog history classroom.Chapter 1 discusses sources as data, centering questions about creation, provenance, interpretation, contextualization, ethical use, curation, biases, and utility for publication.It offers specific examples on classroom activities that help students understand sources as data and learn to extract information from digitized sources.Chapter