Technology And The Historian

Charting the evolution of practicing digital history Historians have seen their field transformed by the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive—all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology's role in the field's development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars. Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together. Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era.

Highly readable, profusely illustrated survey relates technology to history of every age: food production, metalworking, mining, steam power, transportation, electricity, and much more. 354 black-and-white illustrations. 1961 edition.

In modern life, technology is everywhere. Yet as a concept, technology is a mess. In popular discourse, technology is little more than the latest digital innovations. Scholars do little better, offering up competing definitions that include everything from steelmaking to singing. In Technology: Critical History of a Concept, Eric Schatzberg explains why technology is so difficult to define by examining its three thousand year history, one shaped by persistent tensions between scholars and technical practitioners. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars have tended to hold technicians in low esteem, defining technical practices as mere means toward ends defined by others. Technicians, in contrast, have repeatedly pushed back against this characterization, insisting on the dignity, creativity, and cultural worth of their work. ​The tension between scholars and technicians continued from Aristotle through Francis Bacon and into the nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century that modern meanings of technology arose: technology as the industrial arts, technology as applied science, and technology as technique. Schatzberg traces these three meanings to the present day, when discourse about technology has become pervasive, but confusion among the three principal meanings of technology remains common. He shows that only through a humanistic concept of technology can we understand the complex human choices embedded in our modern world.

A collection of scholars and teachers of history unpack how computing technologies are transforming the ways that we learn, communicate, and teach.

Publisher description

Celebrates the creativity of humanity by examining the history of technology as a strategy to solve real-world problems.

The new edition of a milestone work on the global history of technology. This milestone history of technology, first published in 1990 and now revised and expanded in light of recent research, broke new ground by taking a global view, avoiding the conventional Eurocentric perspective and placing the development of technology squarely in the context of a "world civilization." Case studies include "technological dialogues" between China and West Asia in the eleventh century, medieval African states and the Islamic world, and the United States and Japan post-1950. It examines railway empires through the examples of Russia and Japan and explores current synergies of innovation in energy supply and smartphone technology through African cases. The book uses the term "technological dialogue" to challenges the top-down concept of "technology transfer," showing instead that technologies are typically modified to fit local needs and conditions, often triggering further innovation. The authors trace these encounters and exchanges over a thousand years, examining changes in such technologies as agriculture, firearms, printing, electricity, and railroads. A new chapter brings the narrative into the twenty-first century, discussing technological developments including petrochemicals, aerospace, and digitalization from often unexpected global viewpoints and asking what new kind of industrial revolution is needed to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.

A History of Engineering and Technology offers a highly readable account of the development of engineering and technology from prehistory to the present. The author uses the broad sweep of history as a backdrop for expositions of important benchmarks in engineered works and products. The book presents early hydraulic engineering in the context of modern ideas relating technology to the complex social structures that arose in Sumeria and Egypt. It also provides a comprehensive and objective review of the greatest engineering civilization of antiquity-Greco-Roman-and discusses the western world's attempts to recover its achievements after the Middle Ages. The flowering of French and British engineered technology is portrayed through the men and machines that led to today's industrial society. Other topics discussed in A History of Engineering and Technology include the evolution of the modern ship, engineering in modern war and medicine, the advent of the computer, and the Space Age. Over 100 illustrations and the book's in-depth presentation of key theoretical developments make this volume essential as a college textbook for students, as well as an important reference resource for libraries, engineers, and scientists.