As said in the previous post, the printed materials are stable, mainly because it takes considerable time and effort to change them and even when they get changed, there is always a paper trail leading to the old version. Its stability makes it ideal for referencing – it can be found with relative ease. This is not necessarily the case with native digital sources, as the information on the Internet is in motion. It gets copied, deleted and altered constantly. It changes location. This makes a digital historian’s hunt for the particular piece of information, say, a text, much akin to a real hunter’s.

In this situation, the digital historian would have three options – she can either witness, kill or mark the text. Mind you, all of the terms are meant metaphorically. Witnessing the piece of information is perhaps the most common method at present. In practice it means…

On my way back from THATCamp Switzerland, I took the night train from Basel to Copenhagen. This journey takes approximately 15-16 hours and allows plenty of time for reflection, as there is hardly anything else to do. CNL is no Orient Express. At least the five remaining inhabitants of my sleeping car reached a tacit consensus of going to sleep at about 21.00. Given that the attempts of reading before that had been punctuated by electricity disappearing and reappearing at random intervals, it was understandable. So, as the sweet old lady sleeping on the cot underneath mine was snoring like Hulk Hogan, I spent a considerable part of the night musing about different things (including premeditated murder).

Still, most of my reflections circled around the questions of digital sources and the changing role of a historian in the increasingly digital world. So I tried to map out the differences…