Women's History and Digital Media: Uniting Scholarship and Pedagogy

In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Journal of Women's History( JWH), historian Claire Bond Potter asks, "Has the Internet made a difference to the practice of women'shistory? If so, what difference has it made?" ¹Potter emphasizes the potential and challenges of a range of digital resources for women's and gender history, focusing on matters of access, creation of community, and the role of such "traditional" academic arenas as print journals and the standard of sole authored works in the process. This digital media review essay marks the beginning of a new JWHinitiative, connecting the traditional and digital realms of publishing while enhancing a sense of community among scholars of women's and gender history from diverse backgrounds and career paths.

The Journal of Women's Historyjoins such peer-reviewed journals as the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, Western Historical Quarterly, and Bulletin of the History of Medicinein vetting digital media. In a timely intervention, the historian Cameron Blevins calls for historians to seize and shape the current wave of reviews. He observes that peer-review of digital projects ranges from informal Twitter dialogues and blog posts to print journals and, in his analysis, falls into three general categories: pedagogy and public engagement, academic scholarship, and data and design criticism. ²Limiting a digital media review to only one or two of these categories, however, potentially obscures a major contribution of digital projects. ³This review therefore focuses on the primary strength of digital media projects: the ability to bridge the gap between scholarship and pedagogy.

Currently, many digital media reviews reinforce a false dichotomy between scholarship and pedagogy. The Journal of American History( JAH), for example, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, began publishing "web site reviews" as early as June 2009 in collaboration with the educator resources site History Mattersjointly sponsored by American Social History Project and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The JAHeditors explicitly name educators as their primary review audience. ⁴The American Historical Association (AHA) creates a similar separation between digital media scholarship and pedagogy. In 2016, the AHA Todayblog launched the excellent "Teaching with #DigHist" series, edited by historian and high school teacher John Rosinbum, which discusses the use of a range of digital projects in the secondary and university-level classroom. In terms of scholarship, Alex Lichtenstein's 2016 introduction to American Historical Review's "AHR Exchange: Reviewing Digital History," characterizes the AHR'sstrategy of pairing digital media reviews with responses from digital editors as an "opportunity to defend their approach and to clarify how the digital medium made it possible for them to push scholarship in new interpretive directions." ⁵This distinct focus on scholarly contributions in the traditional journal aligns with the AHA "Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians," released in June 2015, where the terms "teaching" and "pedagogy" do not appear in the main section "Forms and Functions of Digital Scholarship." ⁶On the AHA website, however, these scholarship guidelines are found under the site heading "Teaching and Learning," which indicates the need for more focused discussions in the historical profession on the role of digital media projects in scholarship and teaching.

Digital media consumers represent a broad audience, including academics who identify strongly with both scholar and educator communities. Early adopters of digital media, furthermore, are cognizant of statistics that reveal significant numbers of K-12 educators utilizing primary and secondary sources made available through large scale projects like German History in Documents and Images( GHDI) and the Library of Congress's American Memory. ⁷Data from...