Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Over the last two decades, digital technologies have transformed practicallyevery aspect of historians’ professional lives. When I entered graduate school in the1990s, there were still professors who wrote articles out by hand, and then turnedover stacks of legal pads to the departmental secretaries to key into computers. In the archives we took notes with paper and pencil and made as many photocopies as we could afford. Today, laptops have displaced the office staff, most archives allow personal digital cameras, and we leave the archives with hundreds of JPEG files instead of note cards.  But what comes next?  Here are five suggestions, by no means exhaustive of the possibilities, for Labor Historians to make use of digital tools in teaching and research.