Talk: Doing History in the Era of the Web - Seth Denbo

Please join us on Wednesday, March 7th, 4:30pm in Axinn 229 for a talk by Seth Denbo, Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives, American Historical Association (and Middlebury alumnus).

Digital technologies have pervaded every aspect of our lives, even affecting how we study the past. New tools and methods are enabling a variety of novel approaches to making historical arguments. In particular, using innovative technologies, such as GIS and 3D, to explore spaces and places from the past are giving historians new insights and encouraging new audiences. But it is not just the cutting edge use of technology in our field that’s changed; much of the way historians study the past has been transformed. This talk by Seth Denbo, Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives at the American Historical Association (and Middlebury alumnus), will look at highly creative and original digital history projects and discuss the influence of the web more broadly to explore how the field of history is being reshaped.

Seth Denbo is Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives at the American Historical Association. Seth majored in history at Middlebury College, and after graduating in 1990 he spent several years working in academic publishing at Routledge in New York and then London. He earned his PhD from the University of Warwick in England, where he worked on the cultural history of eighteenth-century Britain. After teaching for several years, Seth moved into digital humanities work, as part of teams developing innovative digital projects, first in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and then at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. At the AHA he oversees the publication department and attempts to keep up with the changing landscape of digital scholarship in history and the impact of the digital age on scholarly communication more broadly.