Digital historical Inquiry

Conducting digital historical inquiry means taking full advantage of current and emerging technologies to support conceptualizations of learning history that stress perspective taking and meaning-making over the current transmission textbook-driven model. The recent online availability of thousands of primary source materials at websites such as the Library of Congress' American Memory has given teachers and students the opportunity to engage in the act of interpreting history in ways never before possible. More broadly, "Digital history is the study of the past using a variety of electronically reproduced primary source texts, images, and artifacts as well as the constructed historical narratives, accounts, or presentations that result from digital historical inquiry" (Lee, 2002).

There are a variety of skills which students use when conducting historical inquiries. Teaching students to evaluate the source of the document (sourcing), check the facts and ideas mentioned in one document against those in other documents (corroboration), and set events in a larger context (contextualization) are necessary skills for effective historical thinking (Wineburg, 1991). Hicks, Doolitle, and Ewing (2004) expanded Wineburg's three-part heuristic to include Summarizing, Contextualizing, Inferring, Monitoring, and Corroborating (SCIM-C). The addition of summarization, inferring and monitoring enables a more systematic consideration of what happens when students and historians use historical sources as evidence in the construction of interpretative argument. For example, in order for students to write history, they must not only summarize the content of primary and secondary source documents, detect author bias, determine the incompleteness of a text, and set these emerging facts in the appropriate context, but also resolve conflicting views on an issue, and create their "story," by drawing inferences, in the form of a narrative.

The question we must now confront is the extent to which new skills, beyond Wineburg's three-part heuristic and Hick's SCIM-C, are needed to conduct digital historical inquiry? We might reason that there are some new media literacy skills which relate to locating and authenticating digital historical resources, which students will need to use when conducting digital historical inquiries.

Ayers, E. L. (1999). History in hypertext.

Hicks, D., Doolittle, P. and Ewing, E. T. (2004). The SCIM-C Strategy: Expert Historians, Historical Inquiry, and Multimedia," Social Education 68(3) 221 - 225.

Lee, J.K. (2002). Digital history in the history/social studies classroom [Electronic version]. The History Teacher, 35(4).

Wineburg, S. S. (1991). Historical problem solving: A study of the cognitive processes used in the evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 73-87.