Ways of Telling a History

Thinking about the different ways we tell history to each other.

  • A history of people. Biography, Pultarch’s Lives.
  • A history of things. The telegraph, telephone, steam engine, computer.
  • A history of phenomenon. History of ideas: freedom, myth.

    You can pick a topic and choose to tell it through one of the viewpoints. Listening In, on radio, a thing, tells the story as a phenomenon.

A book like iCon about Steve Jobs, tells the story of Apple through a person.

Where does the history of organizations fit on this spectrum?

Do we need a new form of history, a history of networks or systems?

Personally I find the history of phenomenon to be the most appealing. Perhaps that’s to be expected when a philosopher reads history.

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Todd Suomela
Associate Director for Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship Department

My interests include digital scholarship, citizen science, leadership, and communications.

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