Digital history

Last year I was reading history as a graduate student in Oxford and I discovered there the many distinctive features of Oxford historical research and teaching. The size of the History Faculty seemed to make possible the coexistence of many different approaches to history; nonetheless, at the time I did not hear anything about digital history. Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) provided us with training to cater with the wide variety of computing needs students may have while conducting research. Moreover, I had known of the existence of the Oxford Internet Institute, located just next to my college, but while making use of a reasonably large array of new technologies in my studies (I would typically be the only one using a laptop during tutorials or seminars, but those who attended were too polite to protest against the noise that stemmed from my compulsive typing habits), I never got to associate Digital and History. But, as I have recently discovered, it could have been otherwise: for some time now there has been a vivid debate among Oxford historians and librarians regarding digital history(but as happens there, a lot of fantastic things are going on without much advertisement about it, but one wouldn't want it the other way round).

Digital history can refer to three different things. First, the use of a minimal range of new technologies in the everyday work of historians: emails, online catalogs or word-processors. Secondly, the use of an extended range of new technologies aimed at an increasing productivity in almost every aspect of the historian’s work: finding primary and secondary sources, collecting, organizing, reading and analyzing data, online collaboration in writing and proofreading, and last but not least, publishing. Finally digital history can also offer a completely new approach to history that questions almost every aspect of what we historians do.

The core question here is the following: will there be a digital revolution which will transform history and the humanities as there has been, under rather different conditions, a printing press revolution that revolutionized scholarship?

We are going to study three possible versions of a digital history: when historians use technologies as a complement alongside other tools, when historians substitute all their tools with technological appliances and software and finally when the historians’ immersion in the digital world impacts and changes every aspect, and perhaps the very sense of their craft.

2. Basic computer literacy and its implications: after all we all do digital history

It seems that nowadays, every single member of the more or less formal corporation of historians cannot do without a basic digital toolkit. This toolkit is composed of three main items that answer three basic needs of historians: computerized library catalogues, word processor and emails.

Many libraries seem quite peculiar in so far as they witness the coexistence of old-school librarians, some of whom used to be compilers and copiers of very precise and beautifully penned cards, and a new generation of librarians who coolly consider the complete digitization of their holdings, followed by their complete or partial disposal. As time passes, the old generation tends to disappear, but also to adapt: in large institutions in Taiwan, Oxford, or France or in smaller libraries of religious studies institutions in France or in the United States, I have always been first directed towards a computerized catalogue. Even the most reluctant of historians can see the upside of doing a search by keywords, name or similar criteria. But even the most naïve of researchers would not be satisfied with the process: the ordering of indexes, their materiality and other things that were the fruit of the expertise of librarians were not following a mere logic of convenience but had an intellectual value (though it also needed to be taken cautiously) that cannot be easily replaced by the intricacies of Boolean logic, which is at the core of computer mathematics.

The second major item of the toolkit is the word processor. Using a word processor seems so natural that when some professors tell us that they had to spend quite important amounts of money on dactylographic services to hand-in their theses they seem to us almost prehistoric. But nowadays, a historian who would resist using a word-processor would have to find an alternative, and often costly, way of computerizing his writings. But we must think beyond mere financial considerations: after all a world-class historian could very well afford an assistant dedicated to this task. There is a technological gap between a type-writer and a word-processor that tremendously exceeds the gap between hand-writing and type-writing. I was amused and a bit shocked when discussing with a professor last year he told me that the major drawback about word-processor was that one can always go back on previously written pieces and amend them: it usually makes for more patchy and lengthy pieces, whereas the discipline imposed by the fact of the relative impossibility to amend a handwritten piece usually produced sharper writings.

Finally, emails seem to complete this trilogy of indispensables. Email is a means of communicating that replaces postal mails and, very often, phone calls. It allows for speed and reliability. The implications of using emails are so numerous and wide that they would demand a separate discussion. In the historian’s case, the basic functions of emails are to discuss problems, ask for information, settle practical issues and, more broadly, collaborate.

These three basic features of the digital age are inescapable for historians. And their implications are possibly less than benign. Willing or not, aware or not, every historian nowadays belongs to that digital culture that emphasizes speed and cheapness of search, duplication and communication. But that makes for a rather slim claim to the emergence of a digital history. Technology zealots go well beyond that basic trilogy and would envisage the emergence of a super-historian.

2. Digital history as a simple and yet powerful extension of an historian’s capabilities

Arguably, technologies can be applied to almost everything a historian does. To an outside observer, a historian does a number of things: searching for bibliographical references and archival material, collecting these items, analyzing the data they contain, writing, proof-reading and publishing. Digital history is understood as the application of new technologies to all these operations. In a way this depicts a historian who tries to use technology to facilitate his craft without changing anything about the way he or she understands it.

For digital historians, the web is characterized by both abundance and scarcity. When compiling a bibliography one can use many different websites like Google books (and scholar), websites of libraries or of bookshops. But it is unrealistic to assume that everything is on the Web, or ever will be. To collect and organize this type of data, bibliographical tools like Endnotes or Zotero allow for speed and a great amount of reliability. Zotero even allows for the addition of bibliographical items that are not indexed on the web. Abundance also characterizes the collection of data. An increasingly large amount of digitized books and scholarly articles is accessible for researchers. This accessibility often depends on library subscriptions, which creates abundance for ‘official’ historians and a relative scarcity for non-academic historians (except if they live in the vicinity of open world-class libraries). But this abundance can also be a trap if one decides to ignore undigitized materials. Primary sources are also increasingly available through campaigns of digitization. These campaigns are orchestrated by public or private institutions or even by individuals equipped with simple tools such as digital cameras or scanners. In data analysis, software are available that can dig inside texts, images and even sound and identify pertinent patterns or eliminate useless noise. These tools require of course a certain level of expertise and a close cooperation with computer experts, since most of them are not primarily designed for historians.

The emergence of a web of historians or for historians is not only about finding, collecting and analyzing data; it is also about collaborating with others and discussing issues in order to accelerate the process that leads to scholarly publishing. Sharing references, materials and unpublished papers as well as organizing publications and conferences can be facilitated by the use of the Internet.

What I have just imperfectly described means that historians can go on doing history the way they used to while only outwardly changing their habits. A geek-historian or a history-geek can also think in very traditional ways about core issues like professional history, evaluation standards, academic writing, etc. In this particular vision, digital history is a kind of opportunistic use of anything technology can do for historians without dedicating much thought to how this changes our mental structures, our reading habits, the quality of our writings, the depth of our analyses and the relationship with our audience.

3. Digital history as a new approach to what we do?

All that we have previously discussed is the encounter between historians and the increasingly technological culture in which they act. Historians usually spend quite some time thinking about the way they work; the irruption of new technologies into the humanities has become a topic of discussion among some historians, starting in the United States. Pioneers of digital history, like Roy Rozenzweig and Daniel Cohen, debate on issues related to new objects that emerge with the digital technology. Digital archives render accessible a wide variety of materials to a global audience that is not necessarily expert and thus not always equipped to exploit them according to the standards established by the historical profession. On the other hand, this open availability of sources allows for the possibility of quasi-immediate verification of the sources used by historians.

The relative openness of the web and its standards of evaluation based on popularity challenge the way historians assess the quality of a publication. Nowadays, most scholarly publications are available online, although possibly with restricted access. However, often their format has not changed since the advent of Jstor or other platforms that make them available to a broad audience. They are clearly written by expert historians for other historians who are disciplined enough to read 30-40 pages long articles on sometimes very specialized subjects desirably lit with an original perspective. On the other hand, history blogs, written by professional historians or amateur historians try to devise the proper length, the proper style adapted to web readers, who read in a completely different way.

The immediacy of the new media offers a unique opportunity for the historian to connect with a broader audience. This can radically question the writing style of historians, what they assume as the minimal historical background required to read a scholarly publication, etc. What does hyperlink change to the way references are mentioned? Is the immediacy of the audience’s reaction a threat to the ‘authorized’ voice of the expert? Why should historians write blogs like anyone else, to the risk of seeing their work assessed on the basis of a number of clicks, like anybody else’s written whims? To prove the reality of their claim to a different history, digital historians have started to build new objects of scholarship. Without pretending to exhaust the number of possibilities, I identify two main realizations by historians of the digital age: integrated archives that focus on a historical theme and publications that make use of the broad possibilities of the digital age.

The experts on the subject of digital history would all mention the Valley of the Shadow project, a digital archive focused on the experience of the American Civil War in two American counties located in the same valley but opposed by slavery and the war. This archive is a remarkable example of a successful digital history: it is a repository of materials (mainly texts and images, but also audio files) related to the experience of the war in a very broad sense. The project was conceived in the 1990s by Edward Ayers. Though it is a project undertaken by historians, it contains very limited amounts of interpretative material. The user of the website is invited to see for himself and use freely the large amount of documents available. One of the striking features of this website is the dynamics it created: the website is used by professional historians, amateur historians, teachers, genealogists, etc, yet some users actively intervened to enrich the archive by sending family letters and photos.

Many other existing projects follow a similar logic. Virtual Shanghai is one of them. Historians seem to have found a way to invite everyone to visit their laboratory, and allow free access to impressively large amount of material while keeping up with the standards of scholarship in their field. Obviously all these realizations require funding to digitize materials, create infrastructures to host them, and pay for the expertise of programmers, research assistants and graphic designers. Can historians be the sole creators of such archives? It also blurs the distinction between librarians/archivists and historians. All these actors need to speak the same language in order to cooperate better. They also need to keep up with the pace of technological innovation and understand the public’s needs and expectations.

A second object that is complementary to a digital archive is a digitally rich scholarly publication. A number of articles published by the American Historical Association are of a new kind: they bring together different layers of analysis and try to adapt to the browsing habits of web users. Interactive maps and chronologies, separate sections on historiography, events, view points, all these levels of understanding of a problem that are traditionally organized by the literary craft of a writer are organized in a way that tries to be radically new (one example is Thomas and Ayers, 2003 "The Difference Slavery Made"). This kind of publications poses a whole array of new problems: what does it mean to close an argument if the reader can instantaneously react (which is actually not possible with the AHR format, but it could be)? How does one archive a digital object? The complexity, the “richness” of this kind of digital publication forbids its simple printing and storing.

Digital historians do history in a different way, but is it a better way? Is there not a risk to waste precious time and energy discussing technicalities and making available a huge amount of historical data instead of using it to further our understanding of history? What does authorship mean in this new collaborative environment? How can we do history when we share a common public space with different actors whose motives are sometimes opposed to those of historians (associations of survivors, militants, governments, etc.)? Does audience matter that much when historians are evaluated on the basis of the quality of their peer-reviewed works?

Digital history is there. In many ways, it benefits every single historian by exploring ways to use new technologies profitably. It also alerts us to the opportunities and perils of a digital age that has not yet found a proper way to store its constantly-generated new materials (how a future historian will be able to access the private emails of recent statesmen?). Digital history is of course the history of the digital age, but can it reasonably claim digital imperium on the entire history?