Month: March 2026

One major key change that I saw through the readings about being a historian in a society where technology and digitization is becoming increasingly common in the history field is the both the lack and increased amount of trust and credibility that the public is giving historians through the access of historic materials or information being published on the internet. To me, this can be seen majorly through the lack of understanding of the digital history/humanities field as a whole, with how confusing the wording the surrounds the discipline is. I saw this in Blevins article about “Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense” and how the conversation in this field deals with ‘potential,’ ‘possibility,’ and ‘change’ being the main terms I saw as ways to confuse the public and collegiate students. This field of history is not new in the current year of 2026, but it is still in a transitioning phase because of the new developments in the digital field with more advanced technologies being released to the public and removal of previous tools due to lack of software or placed behind a paywall.

A big impact I think will happen on this field is the rise of Generative AI, it is something that can potentially be used as a tool, which is the whole basis surrounding my project in this course. But, for general digital history, I do not believe that it can be useful in meaningful ways that we as historians try to make our work. Gen. AI has continued to be a very misleading and fallible resource because it does not have the ability to determine which sources have been outdated by new information or a change in general understanding of the certain subject. While Historians can and will make mistakes when creating a piece of work, they have the ability to blame human error or lack of a wider source base. Compared to AI that uses either the whole internet or a large basis of information to create the output about a certain topic, and we have seen the complete false statements that the programs have created about historic subjects because it is using biased or completely false sources coming solely from the internet.

Resume for Sage Milton.

Small weekly update, I lost everything when my internet and service went out on Monday, I had prompts pre-written and descriptions to start revising, but alas, since my service went out mid usage of Gemini it did not save anything that I had done. So I have to restart the description process, but this does give some valuable experience and something to note on the project site about making sure that you have clear and stable connection before using a program because it might not save any progress that you have made with the project.

In slightly better news, we have started to curate prompts to ask the program to see how the chatbot will react and give information based on the data we feed it during the prompt.

The five websites I decided to look over when trying to learn more about digital identities and/or presence, (1) three of them were personal websites containing information that would be necessary for potential employers or grad schools. The last two websites gave information on how to create a proper professional media presence, (2) with tips on what to think about when making content–video, audio, or text–that will be available to the public, and (3) that treating the entire internet–blog posts, comments, etc.–like something that can and will be connected back to your name/identity will create a better digital presence. (4) The last two websites were more helpful in understanding the creation of a digital identity on the professional educator side since it talked about keeping everything separate between your private life and professional life. (5) The last thing I have learnt about a digital identity is that it does not need to be a full professional quality website, but it should have and/or incorporate any prevalent information that your intended audience is looking for.