As WordPress would say, Hello World! Hello, and welcome to the blog portion of tamarawolf.com. Obviously, Tamara Wolf would be me, your friendly neighborhood blogger/grad student/public historian/etc. Please call me Tami. I’m just getting this website and blog up and running, so please do excuse the mess and contain your shock when things change around a bit in these first few weeks. (Months? Years? I’m so indecisive when it comes to design!)

Seeing as this blog (and, well, the whole website actually) is being created for a history and digital media class, it is only fitting that it should be about History in the Digital Age. Or at least the class itself anyway. I rather like this whole idea of creating and using a blog/website. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do, been wanting to do, but haven’t gotten around to actually doing due to, well, life and the dubious pleasures of being a graduate student. So thank you, Jeremy Boggs!

But I digress, as I tend to do. Our class had the pleasure of hosting Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University across the river in Virginia, Monday night. Topics of discussion ranged from the history of historians and technology to issues of shared authority to utilizing the Internet and non-traditional methods to the place of those non-traditional methods in the (academic) field.

One of Dan’s many quotable moments was one this class seems to have taken to heart, “Every graduate student should have a blog.” Blogs, along with other social media tools such as Twitter, mean that graduate students, traditionally not heard all that often in professional circles, get an equal chance to be heard. Although this was discussed in terms of digital humanities, there is no reason blog posts or tweeted ideas can’t be influential in other areas. The validity of an idea does not change because the author blogged it, admittedly muchmuchmuch easier to do in comparison to getting the same article published in a scholarly journal. The open nature of the Internet means that the article is likely to be put under the scrutiny of peer-review as well when other scholars see it. Blogging, Twittering, and using other forms of social media create a personal brand a graduate students can design for themselves. Writing intelligent, insightful comments gets you noticed and your ideas passed along, with which comes opportunities to grow professionally and have an impact on the field.

Well, I’m a grad student and I have a blog. And while I might not change the world in the years to come, I do hope that some of my writings, whatever they are, inspire people in their own way. (Not that a job wouldn’t be nice as well…)