The Digital History Initiative is an ongoing project housed in the Department of History that seeks to further incorporate digital tools into the research, presentation, and production of historical information. The initiative focuses on the introduction of certain digital tools into undergraduate and graduate curriculum including basic web design, digital archiving, digital video production, digital audio recording, geographic information systems (GIS), and web publishing. Not only are these skills essential for historians to research, preserve, and share information with broader public audiences, but they are also important tools that undergraduate students should be equipped to use as they navigate an increasingly digital world. Students learn to build websites, digitize documents, publish primary sources and original research, build digital maps, produce podcasts, and learn basic data collection/data visualization. The Digital History Initiative strengthens the visibility of our students’ work, faculty research, and the Public History Minor.
Initiative Directors
Camden Burd
Camden Burd is an environmental historian interested in the tangled histories of humans and the natural world. His research focuses on the environmental history of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century America. Dr. Burd is interested in creating podcasts, 3D modeling, digital exhibit design, and web-design. He is also the Public History Minor Coordinator.
Brian Mann
Brian Mann is a historian of the modern Middle East with a specialization in 19th/20th century Iran. He teaches undergraduate and honors courses on Middle Eastern history, Islamic history, and world history, as well as upper-level courses on modern Iran, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and British imperialism. He often teaches students Persian as an independent study. His main research interests are nationalism, social movements, and imperialism, as they relate to modern Iran and the Middle East in general, and he is particularly interested in the region of Khuzistan (Iran’s southwestern and oil-rich province which sits along the border with Iraq on the Persian Gulf). He is interested in using Digital Story Maps to explore the past and communicate stories to a broader audience. Dr. Mann is the department’s undergraduate advisor.
