Digital History cartoon

Here's a silly video I've made for the digital history students:


DomoNation.com: digital history cartoon by knavickas


Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com.

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Spatial theory, cultural geography, and the 'spatial turn'

I'm currently working on various seminar papers, and the mood among many historians is that we need theory back in history. James Vernon made an impassioned plea for a return to theory in his plenary lecture for the 2011 Social History Society conference. Basically his message was 'what are we afraid of?' A focus on empiricism has meant we have lost sight of the big ideas, and the big frameworks that shape history. The SHS used to have a theory strand for its conference, but we dropped it a few years ago because the number of papers offered was in decline. In response to Joyce, however, the SHS has reintroduced the 'theory and methods' strand for the next conference. Perhaps this is a sign that theory is back on the agenda.

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'the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing'

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I've been given a brief for a chapter entitled 'the return of materialism?' for a new book series in cultural and social history, and doing some historiographical research, I read Lawrence Stone's 1979 essay in Past and Present on 'The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History'.

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The latter…
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