Wangechi Mwaura

For all the hype around digital technology, historians understand that the novelty of the digital age is limited. At a fundamental level, speed alone makes our technology-driven era distinctive. Nevertheless, that simple shift in pace is altering how we access, analyze, and communicate information as a society and as scholars. Everyone with a stake in historical research—from first-year students to senior scholars to amateur genealogists—needs to thoughtfully consider when these technologies enhance our practices and when we need to demand more from them. To address how digital technology has reshaped the study of the past, Dr. Wiggins is authoring a monograph about the practice of history now. Entitled, Doing Digital History: Twenty-First-Century Methods for Researching the Past, this book will outline the traditional tenets of history’s methodological approaches alongside the possibilities that digital technology opens for historians. My work was to assist Dr. Wiggins in collecting case studies from Africa, examples of digital history in e-learning, archeology and archiving, in order to highlight the progress of this new discipline across the world. Since "digital projects" are not indexed like scholarship or primary-source material, searching for such projects requires complex search strategies (developed in consultation with Dr. Wiggins) to identify historical work that uses digital technologies in the research or presents the research using a website or app. This work will be directly folded into Dr. Wiggins’s book and which will be published by Oxford University Press.