“There is simply no way to manage …[the] deluge of electronic information without the kind of skills that digital historians take for granted. Technologies like .sql, .xml, .rdf and GIS are becoming crucial to the development of historical understanding, with programming languages like Python and Ruby needed for scripting and general purpose development, general architectural principles required for contribution to infrastructure projects, and .php, .html, .css and JQuery needed for publishing. Future historians will need a set of skills earlier generations of historians simply didn’t require."He clarifies that this is not to suggest that,
"... all historians need to develop expertise in all of these computer science-based tools and methods, but that we need some historians to gain some understanding to help us move forward as a community."Furthermore, he insists,
"The goal is to enhance and enable historical scholarship in the digital age, not to replace historical scholarship with computer science.”The questions that arise concern the following:
Do historians have to learn .sql, .xml, .rdf and GIS explicitly, or do they have to learn to master software packages in which these technologies are embedded (i.e. learn them implicitly, through what they enable historiographic practice to do)?
Equally, do historians have to learn .php, .html, .css and JQery explicitly in order to publish, or can they simply learn to master software packages in which these technologies are embedded?
Furthermore, can these suggestions about technological competence (however this is understood) be applied to scholars in other humanities disciplines?
Finally, could a list of such technologies be compiled for academic disciplines as a whole; or are such technology lists discipline-specific?
Are there core technologies that are common to all academic disciplines in a digital age?
Reference
Smithies, James (2013). Digital history in Canterbury and New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of History, 47 (2), pp.249-263.