Open Source Digital History

My readings for this week have largely focused on creation of digital content for use in digital history projects.  One of the most important parts of this, I believe, is the idea of open sourced history.  In history many people do not feel that the term 'open source' applies, after all I did the research for my scholarly article and I should be able to charge what the market will provide for that.  Spiro points out that open sourced journals can be powerful things since they do not have to charge as much, or perhaps anything, to the readers.  This savings will decrease in profit for the author (which can't be much) and has the possibility to substantially increase the readership of the article.

Open source has greater impact in Digital Humanities rather than simply publication.  Open sourced digital history tools being developed have created free resources for historians to use in their work.  This allows historians to focus on what they know best, the content of their digital history projects.  The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is a prime example of an institution creating a suite of resources to make digital history projects better.

Reading both Spiro and Cohen and Rosenberg's Digital History, the amount of variation in the files and way that history is presented is astounding.  With the rise of open source, I believe Digital Historians must convene and decide on standards as well.  For instance, image scans for digital history projects will be in .tif format and no larger than X MB for viewing inside of a webpage, with a downloadable option to download the full resolution image.  The acceptance of certain standards for digital history projects will yield less confusion when using various digital history projects.

I know people are reluctant to abide by another set of rules that they did not create, however I believe this is necessary, especially when looking at the myriad of different digital history projects, listed at the CHNM, VCDH, Nebraska Center for Digital Research and the MITH.  I believe standards for elements within these digital exhibits would create cohesion without having the webpages look like they were simply altered templates (which I believe is what people fear).

Lastly open sources and standards raise the ability of what a digital historian can do on their own, without spending years studying computer science and other factors involved in how everything works.  Open source projects such as Omeka have done wonders in terms of increasing web page creation tools and accessibility to the moderately computer savvy historians.