I haven’t written anything about my research in a very long time. Time for an update.

This is now my second year of work on my Ph.D. I find this an incredibly slow process, but I also see how my ideas are changing into something that might eventually become original research.

I am doing lots of reading about Digital Humanities and especially Digital History and the material is fascinating. Researchers are writing about entirely new ways to represent information. Every day I come up with another communication tool that is new to me. I bookmark each one so I can go back later to figure out how it works.

The work is leading me to look for links between Digital History and the teaching of Historical Thinking skills. Does the use of digital history teaching tools make it easier to develop historical thinking practices in students?

It is not easy to make this connection in the literature, but I may have finally found something today.

Cristian Parellada and Mario Carretero have recently written an article that connects the use of digital maps with the development of historical thinking skills (2022). It is explicit connections like this that I am looking for.

I am really open to suggestions!

I am relying on visuals to chart my way now. To help me keep track of where my thinking and reading are going I am using Canva and Prezi to create a visual record of my current research journey.

I am putting this out to my blog first because I made a commitment last year to create a researcher’s journal. I also would love to hear from someone about how all this looks. I am pretty excited about this and I believe that the visuals are helping me plan for my upcoming comprehensives.

Does this visual record make any sense? How will it evolve over time? What am I still missing here?

My Prezi detailing my first year and a bit of a projection into the fall.

All three are certainly a work in progress, but they represent my thinking up to this point.

So this is where I am at. What do you think?

Where do I go next?