When it comes to digital historians, Dan Cohen is one of the giants of the field. Cohen has been an early scholar of the field, embracing and developing the field since the early 2000s. Over the length of his illustrious career, he’s served as the director for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and founded and served as executive director of the Digital Public Library of America.
Initially, Cohen started out as a religious historian, primarily studying the relationship between American Christianity and mathematics as he worked his way through the Ivy Leagues, getting his B.A in Religion from Princeton in 1990, his M.T.S from Harvard in 1992, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D in History from Yale in 1995 and 1999 respectively.
In the early, 2000s Cohen pivoted hard. Always interested in the history of science and technology, he began to pursue digital humanities and quickly became a pioneer in the field, specializing in promoting digital tools for historical use and creating digital archives and libraries. This culminated in the foundation of the Digital Public Library of America, a digital repository for materials from institutions across the county with the intent of making them easily accessible online. Cohen is also a professor of history, first at George Mason University from 2008 to 2013 and since 2017 is a professor of history and dean of the library at Northeastern University.
Cohen embraced social media as a tool for historians, but nowadays has a more modest presence online. He has run a history blog since 2005 and joined Twitter in 2008. Prior to 2022, Cohen was fairly active on social media, mainly Twitter. It was mostly used as a platform to promote his own work and share history articles, but he also used it for personal use, sharing what was going on in his life and a lot of pictures of his dog. He’s pretty popular too, with nearly 18,000 followers.
One of many, many posts Dan Cohen has made about his dog.
After 2023, Cohen’s Twitter presence almost vanishes, with only a few posts made between October 2023 and now. Cohen has still been blogging throughout this time but just doesn’t use the mainstream platforms anymore. He himself admits uses Threads and X “but [he goes] there as often, and as enthusiastically, as the dentist.” I can’t say I blame him.
Cohen’s Microblog feed
Instead, Cohen posts primarily from Microblog. Microblog also has a function that allows for Bluesky posts to show up in the main feed which means posts from both sites can be viewed from just one feed. He uses this primarily for posting about his work and newsletter as well as linking articles relevant to the field of digital history. Cohen has sent out a digital newsletter called Humane Ingenuity since 2018 that focuses on the intersection of libraries, history, and emerging technology. As you can probably imagine, AI has become a focal point of these posts and articles in recent years. Cohen believes in the accessibility of knowledge, so this newsletter allows for a curious public to easily engage with his work and thoughts as the digital landscape continues to develop. Cohen is fairly apolitical with his online presence, instead preferring to have a very comprehensive approach with a professional base with a few personal touches. He will chime into debates surrounding digital libraries and AI, such as the recent court case of Bartz v. Anthropic, which deals with if using books to train AI constitutes as fair use.
A recent article from Dan Cohen’s newsletter
Overall, Cohen maintains a steady, professional image online even if it’s away from more mainstream social platforms like Twitter. Cohen, as a digital historian, has embraced online platforms for history illustrated by his blog and newsletter and has maintained a professional, history centered approach on said platforms. Cohen’s online presence can be a good blueprint for those looking to have a more professional digital footprint and how to platform digital humanities.
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