Historiografia, digitalizácia a komplexný pamäťový portál PamMap.sk

Abstract

The digital turn in the development of historiography, brought about by the emergence of the Internet about 20 to 30 years ago, has gradually produced several discursive changes, such as replacing grand master narratives with little “patchwork texts” and analogue/print texts with digital texts; increasing the importance of the visual component; promoting open access publishing and introducing new ways of analysing and visualizing historical data. Compared to the two basic publication types produced by historiography before the digital turn (monograph and journal article), a third type – historical portals – is now gaining ground. Memory portals are one type of such portals. They offer their users (who are not called “readers” anymore) digitized historical sources (digitized materials), accompanied by expert descriptions, registry tags (metadata) and encyclopaedic texts. The paper illustrates this trend by discussing the PamMap.sk portal and the new ways to access and process sources it offers to historians and the public at large. The portal combines (1) a database of digitised sources accompanied by metadata; (2) an encyclopaedia; and (3) a cartographic approach to the sources. Compared to print publications, memory portals offer new sources (such as audio and video, which are essential for oral history). In contrast to the “tyranny” exercised by the author of a book, the portal gives the user the freedom to choose not only the topics but also the ways of reading. However, the paper also shows the pitfalls of such portals and their disadvantages compared to “traditional publications” (such as lack of user orientation, wikipediazation and insufficient expertise, and overburdening with too much irrelevant detail).