The UW Department of History is on the cutting edge of applying new technology and media to the field of historical scholarship. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students have expressed their passion for discovery and innovation through a number of prominent and award-winning digital history projects and initiatives, spanning a wide range of thematic, temporal, and geographic areas.
With these digital history projects, members of the department are using technology to change the nature of the discipline in a variety of ways:
- Research - from image capture in the archive, to optical character recognition, building structured datasets of quantifiable information, and even hosting online primary-source repositories, departmental projects are providing greater access to more sources than ever before.
- Analysis - our faculty and students are exploring new ways of understanding historical sources, including statistical data modeling, cartographic and spatial analysis, image analysis, and full-text mining techniques.
- Communication - the department has excelled at using technology to reach broader public audiences, to provide non-textual ways to engage with historical research, and to engage in far-flung collaborative projects.
Every project is different, and the department has the resources available to match technology solutions to the particular challenges of different historical eras, fields, and research questions.