Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age

by Roy Rosenzweig, Anthony Grafton (Introduction)

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians.

While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this book 5 stars for the insightfulness, clarity, and humor of Rosenzweig's writing. However, the arrangement of the essays left out a key detail: when they were originally published. It's ironic to have a book about history without the ability to chart the author's changing perceptions and viewpoints over time. You have to dig deep into the acknowledgments to find original print dates for the essays and even then, things aren't exact. If they every produce a second edition of this book, that would be my main suggested change.

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reads as a history of the internet - you could say it dates itself (in a bad way) through its references, but really, it provides snapshots of what we (and Rosenzweig) thought of the present and potential future at different moments in time. My only complaint is that each entry/essay isn't dated - which really limits how much we can use it as a timeline of our understanding of the internet. (You have to rely on your own knowledge - 'oh, wait, Google doesn't exist yet and he's trying to describe a future with something like it' - to date each essay. )