As an art history major, the most interesting part of the readings was in the introduction to the second chapter of Digital History, “Getting Started.”  The authors discuss how the Internet’s web pages can be altered and changed.  My favorite thing in the world is Renaissance art and art is very important to me.  As an art historian, it is my goal to preserve works of art.  Changing a work is a cardinal sin in an art historian’s mind, unless your restoring the work to its beautiful, initial state, in which case you still aren’t changing it.

If the Internet becomes a prevalent form of art, as we can see it is starting to in the form of graphics and .gifs, the standard for art plagiarism must be examined.  It is so easy to take someone’s work from the Internet and claim it as your own, just as the authors explain that it is often very easy to change a website if you know your way around the Internet.  The use of Photoshop and Adobe have made the ability to create beautiful art on the Internet, but the programs have also made it easy to steal someone else’s work.  And, being that most work is posted on public sites such as Imgur and Tumblr, copyright and plagiarism laws are fuzzy at best.

Potential historical topics for research:

• The evolution of the Republican party since the Civil War
• The history and evolution of the urban legend in America
• The evolution of zombie culture in American society