Digital History and the Politics of Digitization

in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2022)

Much has been made in recent years of the transformative potential of digital resources and historical data for historical research. Historians seem to be flooded with retro-digitized and born-digital ... [more ▼]

Much has been made in recent years of the transformative potential of digital resources and historical data for historical research. Historians seem to be flooded with retro-digitized and born-digital materials and tend to take these for granted, grateful for the opportunities they afford. In a research environment that increasingly privileges what is available online, the questions of why, where, and how we can access what we can access, and how it affects historical research have become ever more urgent. This article proposes a framework through which to contextualize the politics of (digital) heritage preservation, and a model to analyze its most important political dimensions, drawing upon literature from the digital humanities & history as well as archival, library and information science. The first part will outline the global dimensions of the politics of digital cultural heritage, focusing on developments between and within the Global North and South, framed within the broader context of the politics of heritage and its preservation. The second part surveys the history and current state of digitization and offers a structured analysis of the process of digitization and its political dimensions. Choices and decisions about selection for digitization, how to catalogue, classify and what metadata to add are all political in nature and have political consequences, and the same is true for access. The article concludes with several recommendations and a plea to acknowledge the importance of digital cataloguing in enabling access to the global human record. [less ▲]

Mining ethnicity: Discourse-driven topic modelling of immigrant discourses in the USA, 1898-1920

in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2019)

This article aims to offer a methodological contribution to digital humanities by exploring the value of a mixed-method approach to uncover and understand historical patterns in large quantities of ... [more ▼]

This article aims to offer a methodological contribution to digital humanities by exploring the value of a mixed-method approach to uncover and understand historical patterns in large quantities of textual data. It refines the distant reading technique of topic modelling (TM) by using the discourse-historical approach (DHA——Wodak, 2001) in order to analyse the mechanisms underlying discursive practices in historical newspapers. Specifically, we investigate public discourses produced by Italian minorities and test the methodology on a corpus of digitized Italian ethnic newspapers published in the USA between 1898 and 1920 (ChroniclItaly—Viola, 2018). This combined methodology, which we suggest to label ‘discourse-driven topic modelling’ (DDTM), enabled us to triangulate linguistic, social, and historical data and to examine how the changing experience of migration, identity construction, and assimilation was reflected over time in the accounts of the minorities themselves. The results proved DDTM to be effective in obtaining a categorization of the topics discussed in the immigrant press. The changing distribution of topics over time revealed how the Italian immigrant community negotiated their sense of connectedness with both the host country and the homeland. At the same time, without jeopardizing the analytical depth of the findings, the method proved its value of minimizing the risk of biases when identifying the topics which stemmed from the results rather than from preconceived assumptions. [less ▲]