Digital history

Digital history is the use of

Rooted in earlier social science history work, particularly around the history of enslavement in the United States, early digital history in the 1960s and 70s focused on using computers to conduct quantitative analyses, primarily of demographic and social history data - censuses, election returns, city directories, and other tabular or countable data. - with the aim of producing defensible research findings[1] These early computers could be programmed to conduct statistical analyses of these records, creating tallies, or seeking trends across records.^[2] This research into historical demography was rooted in the rise of social history as a field of historical interest. The historians involved in this work sought to quantify past societies, to come to new conclusions about communities and population. Computers proved capable tools for that type of work. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, but the outpouring of quantitive studies by established scholars continued. Since then, quantitative history and cliometrics have been used primarily by historically minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded the Association for History and Computing. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s.^[3]

The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks. In 1982, the Library of Congress embarked on its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its collection on to laserdiscs and CD-ROMs. The library started offering online exhibits in 1992 when it launched Selected Civil War Photographs. In 1993, Roy Rosenzweig, along with Steve Brier and Josh Brown, produced their award-winning CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, designed for Apple, Inc. that integrated images, text, film and sound clips, displayed in a visual interface that supported a text narrative.^[4]

Among the earliest online digital history projects were The Heritage Project of the University of Kansas and

• Combining traditional historical methods and new research methods in order to come to new conclusions.
• Using different tools to extract and analyse larger amounts of data that would not be manageable otherwise.
• Create models and maps of data extracted to create a visualisation of the data.
• Data extracted and analysed can be placed alongside existing historiography to increase combined historical knowledge.

By adding new research methods to existing historical method, historians can benefit greatly from the ability to work with larger amounts of data and develop new interpretations from this.^[9][10][11]

Notable projects

The collaborative nature of most digital history endeavors has meant that the discipline has developed primarily at institutions with the resources to sponsor content research and technical innovation. Two of the first centers, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia have been among the leaders in the development of digital history projects and the education of digital historians.

Some of the noteworthy projects emerging from these pioneering centers are The Geography of Slavery, The Texas Slavery Project, and The Countryside Transformed at VCDH and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution and The Lost Museum at the CHNM. In each of these projects, mediated archives holding multiple types of sources are combined with digital tools to analyze and illuminate an historical question to a varying degree; this integration of content and tools with analysis is one of the hallmarks of digital history—projects move beyond archives or collections and into scholarly analysis and the use of digital tools to develop that analysis. The differences between the ways projects incorporate these integrations are a measure of the development of the field and point to the ongoing debates over what digital history can and should be.

While many of the projects at VCDH, CHNM, and other university's centers have been geared towards academics and post-secondary education, the

In addition to Ayers, Thomas, Lutz, and Rosenzweig, numerous other individual scholars work with digital history techniques and have made and/or continue to make important contributions to the field. Robert Darnton's 2000 article, "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" was supplemented with electronic resources and is an early model of the discussions around digital history and its future in the humanities.^[14] One of the first major digital projects to be reviewed by the American Historical Review (AHR) was Philip Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge"^[15]—a multimedia exploration of changes to Los Angeles' physical profile over the course of several decades. Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh, developed the CD-ROM project "Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000." In the "African Slave Demography Project," Manning created a demographic simulation of the slave trade to show precisely how declined in West and Central Africa between 1730 and 1850 as well as in East Africa between the years 1820 and 1890 due to slavery.^[16] Jan Reiff, of UCLA, co-edited the print and online versions of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Andrew J. Torget, founded the Texas Slavery Project while at VCDH and continues to develop the site as he completes his PhD—likely a model for new digital scholars who will incorporate digital components into larger research agendas.

Another notable project that makes use of digital tools for historical practice is The Quilt Index.^[17] As scholars became increasingly interested in women's history, quilts became valuable to study. The Quilt Index is an online collaborative database where quilt owners can upload pictures and data about their quilts. This project was created due to the difficulty of collecting quilts. Firstly, they were in the possession of various institutions, archives, and even civilians. And secondly, they can be too fragile or bulky for physical transport.

Also in the field of women's history is Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution. which highlights the collective action and individual achievements of women from the 1940s to the present.^[18] In the UK, a pilot project began in 2002 to create a digital library of British History.^[19] This has developed into an extensive collection of over 1,200 volumes, bringing together primary and secondary sources from libraries, archives, museums and academics. Another significant project is the Old Bailey Online, a digital collection of all proceedings between 1674 and 1913.^[20] In addition to the digitized records, the Old Bailey Online website provides historical and legal background information, research guides, and educational resources for students.

Digital history classes

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Digital history is now a common course type in graduate and undergraduate curriculum. For example, the students in Digital History courses at the

Technology

Digital technology tools arrange ideas and promote the unique analysis of data, with many tools previously unavailable to historians opening new avenues for collaboration, text mining, and big data analysis. In addition, digital history offers tools for the presentation and access to historical knowledge online.

Digital historians may use web development tools, such as

The Differences Slavery Made also used geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze and understand the spatial arrangement of social structures. For the article, Ayers and Thomas created many new maps through GIS technology to produce detailed images of Augusta and Franklin counties never before possible. GIS and its many components remain helpful for studying history and visualizing change over time.

The Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (

to visually depict the frequency and importance of user-generated tags, and the recently instituted Google Ngram Viewer allows viewers to search the commonality of textual themes by year.

However, with the development of digital history and the technology used to produce it, there has been questions raised over the validity of it. One such issue, is that raised by Jean Francois Baudrillard. He says that "Western Culture introduced significant modifications to the way it produced the real, by intensifying it and heightening it into a domain of reality in hyperspace: hyper-reality".[26]

Digital history centers

• Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland
• Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia
• Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia
• University of Illinois
  .
• Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University
• Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London
• HUMlab at Umeå University, Sweden

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Digital history.

• Historical geographic information system
• Social media analytics
• Google Trends

References

1. ISBN 978-0-252-08569-7
   .
2. ^ Charles Dollar and Richard Jensen, Historians Guide to Statistics (1971)
3. Blackwell
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4. ^
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   on 2008-03-18. Retrieved 2008-03-31.
5. ^ Martin, Serge Noiret and Inaki Lopez (5 June 2004). "WWW-VL History Central Catalogue Florence (IT)". vlib.iue.it.
6. ^ "The Differences Slavery Made -- Thomas and Ayers -- American Historical Review".
7. ISBN 0-393-05947-2
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8. ^ Bernstein, Adam (2007-10-13). "Digital Historian Roy A. Rosenzweig". Washington Post. Retrieved 2008-04-02.
9. ISSN 1478-0542
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10. doi:10.1080/13555502.2017.1301178
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11. hdl:2299/18336
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12. doi:10.3166/lcn.10.3.37-54
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13. ^ "Victoria's Victoria".
14. ^ Darnton, Robert (2000). "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris". American Historical Review. 5 (1). Archived from the original on 2007-12-17. Retrieved 2008-03-31.
15. ^ "Home Page for Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge". cwis.usc.edu. Archived from the original on 6 September 2011. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
16. ^ Manning, Patrick. 2007. Digital World History: An Agenda. Digital History portal, Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, available at http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/essays/manningessay.php.
17. ^ Kornbluh, Mark. 2008. From Digital Repositories to Information Habitats: H-Net, the Quilt Index, Cyber Infrastructure, and Digital Humanities. First Monday 13(8): available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2230/2019 Archived 2012-02-23 at the Wayback Machine
18. ^ Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution.
19. ^ "British History Online | The core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles". www.british-history.ac.uk. Retrieved 2016-04-28.
20. ^ "Old Bailey Online - The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 - Central Criminal Court". www.oldbaileyonline.org. Retrieved 2016-04-28.
21. Project MUSE 507846
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22. ^ "Digital History". digitalhistory.unl.edu. Archived from the original on 5 June 2010. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
23. ^ "MALLET homepage".
24. ^ "TokenX: A text visualization, analysis, and play tool".
25. ^ "Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds". Archived from the original on 2011-05-29.
26. ^ Mike Gane, Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty (Pluto Press, 2000), p. 34.

Bibliography

• Ayers, Edward L. "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History," University of Virginia (1999).
• Ayers, Edward L. "History in Hypertext," University of Virginia (1999).
• Battershill, Claire, and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).
• Bell, Johnny, et al. "'History is a conversation': teaching student historians through making digital histories." History Australia 13.3 (2016): 415–430.
• Brennan, Claire (October 2018). "Digital humanities, digital methods, digital history, and digital outputs: History writing and the digital revolution" (PDF). History Compass. 16 (10).
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• Burton, Orville (ed.). Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
• Cohen, Daniel J. "History and the Second Decade of the Web". Rethinking History 8 (June 2004): 293–301.
• Cohen, Daniel J. 2005. The Future of Preserving the Past. CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2.2 (2005): 6–19.
• Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
• Crompton, Constance, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens, eds. Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research (Taylor & Francis, 2016).
• Denley, Peter and Deian Hopkin. History and Computing. Manchester: Manchester University, 1987.
• Dollar, Charles, and Richard Jensen. Historians Guide to Statistics (1971), with detailed guide to older studies
• Fridlund, M., Oiva, M., & Paju, P. (Eds). (2020). Digital histories: emergent approaches within the new digital history. HUP, Helsinki University Press.
• Greenstein, Daniel I. A Historian's Guide to Computing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Guiliano, J. (2022). A primer for teaching digital history: ten design principles. Duke University Press.
• "Interchange: The Promise of Digital History." Special issue, Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008). https://web.archive.org/web/20090427063847/http://journalofamericanhistory.org/issues/952/interchange/index.html (accessed May 1, 2009).
• Knowles, Anne Kelly (ed.). Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: ESRI, 2002.
• Kornbluh, Mark. 2008. From Digital Repositories to Information Habitats: H-Net, the Quilt Index, Cyber Infrastructure, and Digital Humanities. First Monday 13(8): available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120223151150/http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2230/2019
• Lutz, John Sutton. 2007. Bed Jumping and Compelling Convergences in Historical Computing. Digital History portal, Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Nelson, Robert K., Andrew J. Torget, Scott Nesbit. "A Conversation with Digital Historians", Southern Spaces, 31 January 2012.
• Rosenzweig, Roy. "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review 108 (June 2003): 735–62.
• Rosenzweig, Roy and Michael O'Malley. "Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web," Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 132–55.
• Rosenzweig, Roy and Michael O'Malley. "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web," Journal of American History 88 (September 2001): 548–79.
• Rusert, Britt. "New World: The Impact of Digitization on the Study of Slavery." American Literary History 29.2 (2017): 267–286.
• Salmi, Hannu. What is Digital History? Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
• Thomas, William G., III. "Computing and the Historical Imagination,"^{[permanent dead link]} A Companion to Digital Humanities ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
• Thomas, William G., III. "Writing a Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account," Digital History (December 2007).
• Turkel, William J, Adam Crymble, Alan MacEachern. "The Programming Historian," (London, NiCHE, 2007-9).

External links

• "History: Digital History". Subject and Course Guides. University of California, Irvine Libraries.