The First of Many

This is an introductory post. It is also a leap of faith, an attempt at a new beginning, and a school project. Make of that what you will.

I was a timorous child.

I was very much the type to purposely look in the opposite direction of the sun just in case. Or actively avoid cracks on sidewalks just in case. Or, on one particularly memorable occasion, cling to the top of a 10 m diving platform for what felt like 2 hours, but in reality was probably more like 3 minutes, in a failed effort to push myself on a school-sanctioned swimming trip. I still remember the dizzying feeling of walking back down from the top and assuring myself that I had made the right choice; ten year old pride be damned.

Luckily, I’ve shed a lot of that anxiety as I’ve grown up. I wear sunglasses, I’ve preemptively apologized to my mother for her back, and while I still don’t like heights, I instead chuckle fondly at diving platforms when I go for my weekly swim. However, that doesn’t make trying new things suddenly easy.

I get a lot of echoes of that childish “fear of something new” when I consider doing history in the digital space. I would never describe myself as “tech savvy”. Unlike many in my age group, I’ve never found navigating online to be intuitive. Coding? What is that? How does one code?

But now, I think that fear is tempered with a sense of excitement. While I know I’m not good at it yet, I’m excited to get better! I’m genuinely jazzed to learn skills that seem so practical and applicable to the field I love so dearly. While there will always be part of me that is scared of failure, learning about digital history seems like such a no-brainer when looking at the future of public history. Also, there’s very little chance of my body hitting the water and exploding into pink matter. Which I find very encouraging.

So while I find the medium of digital history to be the most nerve racking thing about taking History 9808, I also feel assured that everything is going to turn out alright. There will be stumbles, but that’s why we ask questions. And if I didn’t know how to ask a question at this point, then what was my entire undergraduate degree for?

At this point, I find myself mostly inspired by projects such as Borealia or Puppet History. Borealia really pushes to connect historians in the academic field to a wider audience and I think does so very effectively. Its blog posts are always comprehensive without feeling exclusionary to audiences not educated in the study of history. It’s Teach My Research series does a particularly great job of creating material that would be useful to educators.

On the other hand, I aspire to the accessibility and tone of Puppet History as a show. While a blog can never capture the diversity of the showmanship present in the series (and I have more than a few questions about how the research is conducted for the show), I think it’s popularity alone has helped open minds. The lessons I have learned from it about using humour as a persuasive tool have stuck with me.

If nothing else, I aim to strike a balance with this blog. To write about history that interests me, and hopefully you, but to do so in a way that does justice to the absurdity of life.

And the absurdity of 10 m diving platforms.