Innovating & Sharing History: The Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (original) (raw)
Technologies of History Chapter 6: Digital Histories
It is a truism of the post-Foucauldian world that the very existence of categories of knowledge and institutionalized disciplines shapes what and how we think. Just as the emergence of the photographic apparatus altered nineteenth-century perceptions of the world, 1 increasingly powerful digital tools for storing, retrieving, and combining historical information now impact the way the past is conceived and reconstructed. 2 The global reach and virtually limitless storage capacity of the Internet, in particular, has inspired universities, libraries, and archives to reposition themselves as producers and distributors rather than simply preservers and guarantors of information. As a result, institutional resources are increasingly redirected toward the digitizing and organizing of historical information into databases that are accessible via both public and proprietary computer networks. The growing conception of computers as offering access to a master network of interlocking databases points to a transformation of fundamental notions of the past and the nature of historical research. It is within this milieu that Hal Foster asks, "Is there a new dialectics of seeing allowed by electronic information? . . . Art as image-text, as info-pixel? An archive without museums? If so, will this database be more than a base of data, a repository of the given?" 3 One answer may be found in the movement toward recombinant or "database histories"-that is, histories comprised of not narratives that describe an experience of the past but rather collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated within categories and organized according to predetermined associations. These collections in turn offer users, whether they are artists, gamers, or geeks, both the materials and structures by which the past may be conceived as fundamentally mutable and reconfigurable. Taking advantage of the logics of remix and computational culture and the kinds of repetitions and modifications built into video games, these projects rest along a continuum, moving from serious artworks to pop-culture hacks; however, they share a staunch refusal of the stability of a single "history," instead offering us a relation to the past that is always already open to continual revision and reinterpretation.
2013
Digital humanities seem to be omnipresent these days and the discipline of history is no exception. This introduction is concerned with the changing practice of ‘doing’ history in the digital age, seen within a broader historical context of developments in the digital humanities and ‘digital history’. It argues that there is too much emphasis on tools and data while too little attention is being paid to how doing history in the digital age is changing as a result of the digital turn. This tendency towards technological determinism needs to be balanced by more attention to methodological and epistemological considerations. The article offers a short survey of history and computing since the 1960s with particular attention given to the situation in the Netherlands, considers various definitions of ‘digital history’ and argues for an integrative view of historical practice in the digital age that underscores hybridity as its main characteristic. It then discusses some of the major changes in historical practice before outlining the three major themes that are explored by the various articles in this thematic issue – digitisation and the archive, digital historical analysis, and historical knowledge (re)presentation and audiences.
Exploring the History of Digital History: Setting an Agenda
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
In 2003 the late American historian and digital history pioneer Roy Rosenzweig wrote that historians were confronted with a "fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance" (Rosenzweig 2003). As more and more historical sources were digitised, Rosenzweig argued that historians urgently needed to rethink their practices. To this day, this diagnosis remains a defining characteristic of doing history after the digital turn. Yet the problem of technologically induced abundance in historical research is far from new. During one of the first computing in the humanities conferences at Yale University in 1965, a predecessor of Rosenzweig, Hayward Alker, already spoke about the need to confront "problems of abundance" in historical research due to the availability of "masses of [digital] historical data" (Alker 1965). This is only one of many possible examples that can serve to illustrate a broader point: key epistemological and methodological questions in what we now call 'digital history' were already debated decades ago by earlier generations of computing historians, yet this is often forgotten. Such forgetfulness is not exclusive to the discipline of history, however, but a consequence of the fact that "the history of computing in the humanities is an almost uncharted research topic" (Nyhan, Flinn and Welsh 2015). As a result, much discourse about digital humanities in the past twenty years is characterised by a rhetoric of radical newness. This situation has recently begun to change, as interest in the history of the digital humanities is growing. These endeavours can be seen as part of a broader process of consolidating the field by excavating its historical and intellectual underpinnings.
Towards a New Digital Historicism?
Making Sense of Digital Sources, 2012
This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially of audiovisual sources – is comparable to the boom of critical source editions in the late 19th century. But while the dramatic rise of accessibility to and availability of sources in the 19th century went hand in hand with the development of new scholarly skills of source interpretation and was paralleled by the institutionalization of history as an academic profession, a similar trend of an emerging digital historicism today seems absent. This essay aims at reflecting on the challenges and chances that the discipline of history – and the field of television history in particular – is actually facing. It offers some thoughts and ideas on how the digitization of sources and their online availability affects the established practices of source criticism.
Digital Histories: Emergent Approaches within the New Digital History
The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of history as practised by scholars of different methodological and political orientations and subjects of study is really more of a patchwork of different fields and sub-fields. While not every kind of digital history applies to each sub-field, some forms of digital technique has been put to use in practically every domain that historians study. Because of the relative novelty of historians’ exchanges about digital methods, it is important that those essays are pedagogical in approach and critical as to method. This conclusion hazards that the work ahead for digital historians includes theorizing the bridge between close and distant readings, theorising the difference between AI and statistical measures, transparent documentation of the choice of algorithm, text and result in the practice of critical search, and engagement with new standards of scholarship from the institutions of historical ...
Circulating Culture for the Knowledge Continuum: Living History, Digital History and the History Web
This article surveys the cultural record in the digital environments and the current efforts to capture this record and circulate it as knowledge, documents, and collections in memory institutions, and provide a basis for the creation of new knowledge. The goals of digital preservation are interpreted in the light of recent arguments about the role of the humanities in providing access to the complete human experience, of the changing idea of the archive representing that experience, and of the roles of memory institutions in supporting the humanities project. Two sets of current preservation activities are identified and surveyed - web archiving (of national web spaces, web spheres) and curated collections of primary sources from the history web. The emerging forms of interpretive and point-of-view history, invented archives, and digital libraries capturing local history, everyday experience and community memory illustrate how digital media can support interpretive and multi-perspective historiography.
What is Digital History? A Look at Some Exemplar Projects
2009
∗University of Nebraska - Lincoln, dseefeldt2@unl.edu University of Nebraska - Lincoln, wthomas4@unl.edu This paper is posted at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/98 ... From the Intersections: History ...