Digital History Anthologies on the Web:German History in Documents and Images

Abstract

Initial public offerings (IPOs) in the dot-com world do not always turn out to be the darlings they are expected to be. Ask Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook's IPO in May 2012. But even successful new ventures often defy their founders' expectations. As we hope to suggest in the following report,German History in Documents and Images(GHDI)—a project that has put thousands of primary source texts, drawings, photographs, and maps on the internet, along with hundreds of pages of accompanying commentary—has drawn critical appreciation from specialists and nonspecialists alike, but it has also raised thorny questions about authorship, authority, and audience. Those questions concern the writing of history in general and the newer, more specific discipline of “history on the web.” Like the project itself, this report is the result of a collaboration among the GHDI project staff, which is based at the German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington, D.C., and the GHDI volume editors, all of whom teach (or taught) German history at colleges and universities in North America. In the following pages, we will discuss the origins and early goals of the project, describe the challenges associated with the realization of a large, collaborative history project of this nature—whether in book or digital form—and reflect upon what we perceive as the promise and perils of digital history anthologies.