Let’s Put on a Show

By James Marten. I am hardly an expert in the digital humanities, although I was the director of a fairly early example of the projects that characterized the field during the first phase of the movement, when content tended to trump technology and many of us had romantic and ultimately naïve notions of what it meant to “democratize” history, in the words of Ed Ayers, the developer of the iconic The Valley of the Shadow. In 1999, the year I started the Children in Urban America Project, Ayers published a kind of status report of the emerging field of digital history (you can see it at http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html). Read more...