DOING CHURCH HISTORY IN A CYBER CULTURE IN NIGERIA: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

Résumé

Before the cyber age, doing church history or reconstructing a past event in the life of a church involved mainly the use of primary sources obtained through physical visits to relevant church, private and public archives and one-on-one oral interviews with eyewitnesses. In a cyber culture, will doing church history continue the same way it used to be before the cyber era? Will correspondences and diaries continue to be accessible to the church history researcher? How can the church historian access the email correspondences of a dead church leader? What happens to diary entries made in a tablet or palmtop? Must interviews involve eye-to-eye contact for them to be valid? How can foreign archives be accessed? What are the problems and prospects of doing church history in the cyber age? The study uses the qualitative method to answer these questions. The findings reveal that doing church history can benefit from online resource materials. Online interviews are valid possibilities. It is also possible for scholars who are doing church history to get archives sources from distant archives. Getting correspondences through the email inbox of a dead person will be a herculean task that involves ethical considerations. Getting information from diary entries in palmtops or tablets will be challenging to a historian who needs such information for doing church history. Flowing from the findings, the study recommends that church historians should explore the use of the internet for doing church history. The study also recommends that email users and those who make diary entries in their laptops, palmtops and tablets should let their next of-kin know the password to their mails and personal computers; and should also give their consent in the form of a will for researchers to access their inbox and computers whenever they are no more.