Just to give my many as-yet-only-theoretical readers a little context, I am currently taking a called Digital Tools for Historians, and in this second week we are continuing to reflect on theory. Dr. French has asked that we consider five big questions in light of eight articles spanning the past twenty years of history as an academic field. Below is my admittedly in artful reflections on these questions.
What is Digital History?
Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas answered this question directly and succinctly just over a decade ago (and counting--take a glance at the timestamp of this blog, historians of the future). It is "an approach to examining and representing the past hat works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network, and software systems." The Big Question, to my mind, is whether digital history is best described as a new set of tools useful for an increasing percentage of historians or a fundamental transformation of what historians do. Even with laughable hyperbole like Louis Rossetto of Wired Magazine heralding "social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discover of fire," I actually lean toward fundamental transformation rather than powerful new tools. Yes, historians before and after the digital revolution both seek to understand the past, but it seems as though what understanding means has changed. This is a gross oversimplification, but history's focus on explanation has been replaced in digital history with a concern for visualization.
The sensationally-obtuse economic analysis of Time on the Cross forty-five years ago provides a nifty cautionary tale for historians too in the grips of the insights of Charles Beard. However, we have not yet repented of our preoccupation with quantification. A good friend drolly remarked that social scientists cannot resist taking two unquantifiable aspects of human life (joy, honor, beauty, etc...) and assigning them to the x-and-y-axes of a graph. Digital historians do this less than psychologists, but we still do it. More often we report on the frequency of sets of words and then sheepishly acknowledge we can only infer possible explanations of the significance of word-use.
How does 21st century Digital History theory/practice differ from earlier applications of computer technology to historical research, such as the data-driven quantitative history (“cliometrics”) of the 1970s?
As we close out the second decade of the twenty-first century, it still seems as though digital history is in something of a pubescent stage. In brief, we are still swimming around in data, unsure of the best tools to make sense of it. My tone has been a bit too sour up to this point, so I'm going to pivot a bit and say that the past twenty years has clearly shown growth and a lot of good history has been done digitally. It's just that we're still waiting for that hockey stick exponential rise on the line graph of powerful digital contributions, and I might be getting somewhat impatient.
To answer the header question directly, current digital history is far more focused on experience and scholarly networking than turning everything into numbers, though as indicated above I think we still have further to go before we are no longer guilty of overemphasizing measurement and sample size. I think we are also more wisely trying to make as much source-material available to each other for conversation and collaboration rather than just use the new tools for ourselves and refer readers to an appendix for our data and methodology.
How does Digital History differ from Digital Humanities?
My analysis here is probably going to be pretty facile, but digital history is a subset of digital humanities that is more concerned with understanding the human past rather than human nature most broadly. For that reason, we tend to be more staid and conservative in our approach to the use of digital tools than other digital humanists, and have used tools that fill gaps within our traditional paradigm, e.g., Global Information Systems (generally, "where on earth did this happen" is much more important to a historian than a sociologist).
What are the promises/perils of doing Digital History?
The promise of Digital History is the ability to reach a wider audience than ever before, having studied a great number of more diverse sources than ever before, having produced for that audience a product that appeals more directly to their senses. Hyperlinking allows connections to be made with so much less work, and storage is so much easier and information more easily-retrieved than ever before, and with every sign that it will get progressively more easy.
To my mind, the most significant peril is what has happened to performance art, journalism and photography--the barrier to entry is now so low that the supply is overwhelming demand. Just like Broadway, where you can't make a living, only a killing, the structure of the economy within the academy is experiencing a severe strain, and readjustment seems about as vital as it is inevitable. Historians also fret over how much digital documentation is being lost to the maw of archaic operating systems and a lack of back-compatibility, but I'm uncompelled. We already get more data everyday than anyone could review in a hundred lifetimes, so I think future historians will be okay.
Can we make Digital History, as a field, more inclusive?
Professors Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan argue pretty implacably that yes, we can do a great deal better, Leon diagnosing and Brennan pointing to tools for a cure. While I found Leon's work a tad uncharitable to her field, given that the second wave of feminism just crashed less than two generations ago, it was nevertheless disturbing to read of so many important female contributions that have been and continue to be marginalized. My big gripe is that Brennan and Leon outline a lot of the smoke and just a bit of the fire of injustice women and other groups have suffered from the white male academy, the wood is out of frame. Why are misogyny, racism, and cultural elitism such barnacles on the human heart and mind? If I have learned anything in the past decade, it is that (self) awareness can never be taken for granted.
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