Digital Histories: Emergent Approaches within the New Digital History (original) (raw)
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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.
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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.