From the readings, I believe that the key change for historians in an ever increasing digital world relates to how their work is viewed. The web is an increasingly public space, but these digital history websites are usually only seen within the circle of scholars connected to the author of the site. Utilizing the web for digital public history sites enables a connection between a community and the scholars that is always visible and has changes that can be updated instantaneously. If digital historians want their work to be viewed by more people, they will have to join onto projects from preestablished communities looking for someone to conduct the research needed (freelance historians?). This relates to the shift from traditional argumentative history that builds on top of itself through defended arguments to methods such as topic modelling that leave little room for interpretation of the results themselves, instead creating why questions to the raw data created (why did Ms. Janeston write about her potatoes so often?). In short, historians that want their work to be seen by more people will have to be less argumentative in their approach and historians that want to build arguments to challenge established history will need to work harder to get their work seen by more people.
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Love this thought process on the changes! I think it is so true. I really like how Blevins mentioned that digital history has a lack of argument-driven projects. But if the goal is to promote it to a wider audience, you have to make the content more digestible. And if you make a digital project that is less focused on a specific audience, then you also lose the public history aspect in addition to the argument-driven one. So, I am interested to see how historians will navigate this almost Catch-22 if they want to bring back more “traditional” history practices.