Curriculum Information

Studying History in the digital age is a confusing business. Amidst the sea of information it presents, the historian, still toiling away with their trusted methods and tools, seems at risk of submergence. Imagine writing the history of a current event in 100 years’ time: the questions of source authenticity, provenance and selection would be mind-boggling. When history emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, information technologies imbued historians with the sense that they could capture and re-present the past. Today, the dominant technologies threaten to bring the fundamentals of the discipline into a state of disarray.

Yet it is not as if the world has moved on and historians have not. Historians find means of working with emerging technologies, incorporating it into their practice, innovating new forms of representation and modifying the standards by which they scrutinise their work. Across all the media revolutions—from the advent of the printing press to the rise of AI—the same principles of historical practice still survive: how do I date and verify a source, where does it come from, what kind of evidence does it provide, and how do I embed it in a world of conflicting interpretation, both historical and contemporaneous? Perhaps having too much information presents a situation not so different from having scant information at all.

This module invites students to interrogate the relationship between media, technology and historical knowledge. In part, it is a history of the media: of the printing press, newspapers, radio, television and the world wide web. Yet it is also a media history: an investigation of how media technologies are not just part of history, but also produce history in a manner that has implications for the historical method and politics of knowledge. Students will learn how to become not only critical historians, but also multi-modal practitioners, capable of grasping the pitfalls and possibilities of ‘doing history’ across media platforms.