On Digital History

ZAAGSMA, Gerben

doi:10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9344

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On Digital History

ZAAGSMA, Gerben

2013 • In Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 128 (4), p. 3-29

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10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9344

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Keywords :

general;digital history;politics;digitization

Abstract :

[en] Digital humanities seem to be omnipresent these days and the discipline of history 3 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.

Disciplines :

History
Arts & humanities: Multidisciplinary, general & others

Author, co-author :

ZAAGSMA, Gerben ; University of Luxembourg > Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)

External co-authors :

Language :

English

Title :

On Digital History

Publication date :

2013

Journal title :

Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden

ISSN :

0165-0505

eISSN :

2211-2898

Publisher :

Nijhoff, Netherlands

Special issue title :

Digital History

Volume :

128

Issue :

Pages :

3-29

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

http://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/index.php/bmgn/article/view/9344

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Bibliography

'In history, as elsewhere, what counts is not the machine, but the problem. The machine is only interesting insofar as it allows to tackle new questions that are original because of their methods, content and especially scale', Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 'L'historien et l'ordinateur', in: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l'historien (Paris 1973) 11-14, 11.
This is by no means to suggest they are identical phenomena; see for a good discussion framed in terms of varying epistemic cultures: Patrik Svensson, 'Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities', Digital Humanities Quarterly 3:3 (2009).
Robert P. Swierenga, 'Clio and Computers: A Survey of Computerised Research in History', Computers and the Humanities 5:1 (1970) 1-21, 5.
Roberto Busa, 'The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus', Computers and the Humanities 14:2 (1980) 83-90, 89.
Andrew Prescott, 'Making the Digital Human: Anxieties, Possibilities, Challenges', Digital. Humanities@Oxford Summer School (6 July 2012). See: http://digitalriffs.blogspot.nl/2012/07/making-digital-human-anxieties.html.
See for a recent discussion regarding the situation in contemporary history: Kiran Klaus Patel, 'Zeitgeschichte im digitalen Zeitalter. Neue und alte Herausforderungen', Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 59:3 (2011) 331-351. In 2013 a special Digital History working group was created within the German Historikerverband (Association of Historians) making it, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the first national professional organisation of historians to give digital history an organisational expression.
See: http://www.historikerverband.de/arbeitsgruppen/ag-digitalegw.html.
See: Demetrius Waarsenburg, 'e-Humanities: Combining Forces into an Integrated Policy Vision', Brainstorm Meeting - e-Humanities: Innovating Scholarship (NIAS Wassenaar, 29 March 2011). Online at: http://www.nias.knaw.nl/ Content/nias/Documents/Booklet%20e-Humanities%20 Meeting.pdf.
See: Toni Weller, 'Introduction: History in the Digital Age', in: Toni Weller (ed.), History in the Digital Age (London 2013) 1-21, 4. I disagree with Weller's insistence that 'historians do not need to learn new technologies or computer codes'. First of all, learning to use new technologies and coding are not the same thing. But more importantly, historians will have to acquire the basic skills needed to work with digital resources.
To name some of the most important book publications: Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia 2006), online version: http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/;
Michael J. Galgano, Chris Arndt and Raymond M. Hyser, Doing History: Research and Writing in the Digital Age (Wadsworth 2008);
Wolfgang Schmale, Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft (Wien 2010);
Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (New York 2011);
Klaus Gantert, Elektronische Informationsressourcen Für Historiker (Berlin 2011);
Peter Haber, Digital Past: Geschichtswissenschaft im Digitalen Zeitalter (München 2011);
Jean-Philippe Genet and Andrea Zorzi (eds.), Les historiens et l'informatique: Un métier à réinventer (Rome 2011);
Weller, History in the Digital Age;
Frédéric Clavert and Serge Noiret (eds.), L'histoire contemporaine à l'ère numérique/Contemporary History in the Digital Age (Brussels 2013).
See: Busa, 'The Annals of Humanities Computing'.
The web version of the Index Thomisticus can be found at: http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/.
See: Manfred Thaller, 'Controversies around the Digital Humanities: An Agenda', Historical Social Research 37:3 (2012) 7-23, 8.
On the conference itself see: Dell Hathaway Hymes (ed.), The Use of Computers in Anthropology: Result of a Conference at Burg Wartenstein Austria, June 20-30, 1962 (London 1965). I am aware that anthropology departments nowadays are often part of social science faculties, yet chapters such as 'Computer Processing and Cultural Data: Problems of Method' or 'Linguistic Data Processing' clearly justify the conference being included in a history of digital humanities.
Jess Balsor Bessinger and Stephen Maxfield Parrish (eds.), Literary Data Processing Conference Proceedings, September 9, 10, 11, 1964 (White Plains, NY 1964).
For more on humanities computing's 'epistemic commitments', see: Svensson, 'Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities'.
See: http://cdh.uva.nl/aboutcdh/about-cdh.html. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is currently also developing plans to create a Humanities Centre which would have a strong emphasis on digital humanities. What shape these plans will take is currently not known, however.
Daniel Greenstein, 'Bringing Bacon Home: The Divergent Progress of Computer-Aided Historical Research in Europe and the United States', Computers and the Humanities 30:5 (1996) 351-364, 357.
See for a good overview of pre-computer and early computer aided research: Swierenga, 'Clio and Computers'.
Greenstein, 'Bringing Bacon Home', 354-355.
See also: Onno Boonstra, Leen Breure and Peter Doorn, Past, Present and Future of Historical Information Science (Amsterdam 2004) 25.
See for good overviews in addition to Greenstein: Haber, Digital Past;
Boonstra, Breure and Doorn, Past, Present and Future of Historical Information Science.
Le Roy Ladurie, 'L'historien et l'ordinateur', 14.
See for an important example: V. A. Ustinov, 'Primenie elektronnyck matematiceskich masin v istorices koj Nauke' (the application of electronic computing machines in historical science) Voprosy Istorii 8 (1962) 92-117.
Referenced in: Onno Boonstra and Ben Gales, 'Quantitative Social Historical Research in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future', Historical Social Research 30 (1984) 35-56, 35.
For a short summary of Russian developments from the early 1960s onwards also see this paper: Leonid Borodkin, 'History and Computing in the USSR/Russia: Retrospection, State of Art, Perspectives', XI International ahc Conference (1996); http://www.ab.ru/~kleio/aik/aik.html.
The website can be found here: http://www.hki.uni-koeln. de/kleio
See: William G. Thomas III, 'Computing and the Historical Imagination', in: Susan Schreibman, George Siemens and John Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Malden, MA 2004). Online version: http://www. digitalhumanities.org/companion/index.html;
Ian Anderson, 'History and Computing', Making History (2008); http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/history-and-computing. html#3.
For a more detailed overview of early developments in the Netherlands see: Boonstra and Gales, 'Quantitative Social Historical Research in the Netherlands'.
The online archive can be found at https://easy. dans.knaw.nl/ui/ datasets/id/easy-dataset:50714.
R. C. W. van der Voort, L. Breure and E. H. G. van Cauwenberghe (eds.), Special issue 'Geschiedenis en Informatica', Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 103:2 (1990) 213-390.
Onno Boonstra, Leen Breure and Peter Doorn, Historische Informatiekunde (Hilversum 1990).
See for example: Matthew Kirschenbaum, 'Hello Worlds', The Chronicle of Higher Education (23 January 2009), http://chronicle.com/article/Hello-Worlds/ 5476.
Fred Gibbs, 'Coding in the Humanities' (5 August 2011), http://fredgibbs. net/blog/teaching/coding-in-the-humanities/.
For historians there is The Programming Historian 2, http:// programminghistorian.org
a follow up to: William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern, The Programming Historian, 1st ed. NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment (2007-11), http://niche-canada.org/programming-historian.
Respectively occupied by Kees Mandemakers (IISG) and Charles van den Heuvel (Huygens ING). Mandemaker's oration can be downloaded here: http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/publications/ 978-90-5260-352-0.pdf.
See for more information the website of DEN - Kenniscentrum Digitaal Erfgoed: http://www.den. nl.
See also the 'Benchmark Data by Country and Organisation Type-2012' dataset on the ENUMERATE Data Platform for Dutch numbers: http:// enumeratedataplatform.digibis.com/datasets.
http://www.dimcon. nl; http://digitalecollectie.nl.
The Dutch partner in DARIAH is DANS: http://dariah.eu/about/our-partners/ netherlands/country-profile.
See: http://alfalablog.huygensinstituut.nl.
11 out of 45 projects. Note that this includes two literary studies projects with a historical bent and one art-historical project, excluding these projects leads to a 1:5 ratio. See this page on the CLARIN website for an overview of calls & accepted projects: http://www.clarin. nl/node/281.
See http://www.clariah.nl.
The terminological transition from 'history and computing' to 'digital history' took place around the year 2000. See this ngram: http://goo.gl/V9HDM.
Digital history - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital-history.
Daniel J. Cohen et al., 'Interchange: The Promise of Digital History', The Journal of American History 95:2 (2008) 452-491, 453.
Cohen et al., 'Interchange', 455.
http://digitalhistory.unl.edu.
Jeffrey Schnapp and Todd Presner, Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Los Angeles 2009). In the Netherlands the word 'ehumanities' is often used instead of digital humanities; occasionally 'computational humanities' acts as a synonym, which is problematic as used in this sense it is a reductionist pars pro toto.
The two classic takes on commonalities are Willard McCarty's methodological commons and John Unsworth's scholarly primitives. See: Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (Basingstoke 2005) 114-158;
John Unsworth, 'Scholarly Primitives: What Methods do Humanities Researchers have in Common, and how might our Tools reflect this?', Symposium Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice (King's College London, 13 May 2000).
Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, 'The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing (Spring 2012 Version) ', in: Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age (forthcoming University of Michigan Press. Trinity College (CT) web-book edition, 2012), http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/data/gibbs-owens-2012-spring/.
On Otlet see for instance: Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarié, 'P. Otlet's Mundaneum and the International Perspective in the History of Documentation and Information Science', in: Trudy Bellardo Hahn and Michael Keeble Buckland (eds.), Historical Studies in Information Science (Medford, NJ 1998) 34-42.
On Luhmann's card index system: Niklas Luhmann, 'Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen', in: Horst Baier, Hans Matthias Kepplinger and Kurt Reumann (eds.), Öffentliche Meinung und Sozialer Wandel: Public Opinion and Social Change. Für Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (Opladen 1981).
See also: Markus Krajewski, Zettelwirtschaft (Berlin 2002).
Otlet's Mundaneum as a knowledge organisation system has also been viewed as a precursor of the semantic web, see: Charles van den Heuvel, 'Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective: The Designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for Telecommunication and Machine Readable Documentation to Organize Research and Society', Knowledge Organization 36:4 (2009) 214-226.
Willard McCarty, 'In the Age of Explorations', closing keynote lecture for the conference Exploring the Archive in the Digital Age (King's College London, 8 May 2010). See: http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty, %20Age%20 of%20explorations.pdf.
See for a proposal: William J. Turkel, Kevin Kee and Spencer Roberts, 'A Method for Navigating the Infinite Archive', in: Weller (ed.), History in the Digital Age, 61-76.
See also the 'how to' section on Turkel's blog: http://williamjturkel. net/how-to/.
These claims are partly inspired by Anthony J. G. Hey, Stewart Tansley and Kristin Michelle Tolle, The Fourth Paradigm: Data-intensive Scientific Discovery (Redmond, Wash. 2009).
Guy Pessach, '[Networked] Memory Institutions: Social Remembering, Privatization and Its Discontents', Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 26:1 (2008) 71-149.
Natasha Stroeker and René Vogels, Survey Report on Digitisation in European Cultural Heritage Institutions 2012 (Panteia on behalf of ENUMERATE, May 2012) 14.
On abundance see Roy Rosenzweig's classic article: Roy Rosenzweig, 'Scarcity or Abundance?: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era', The American Historical Review 108:3 (2003) 735-762.
See: Mats Dahlström, 'Critical Editing and Critical Digitisation', in: W. Th. van Peursen, Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd and Adriaan van der Weel (eds.), Text Comparison and Digital Creativity: The Production of Presence and Meaning in Digital Text Scholarship (Leiden 2010) 79-97.
Rosenzweig, 'Scarcity or Abundance?', 752.
See for instance: Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu and Thomas Nygren, 'Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project', Africa Today 52:2 (2005) 55-77;
Michelle Crouch, 'Digitization as Repatriation?', Journal of Information Ethics 19:1 (2010) 45-56.
For information on the state of digitisation in Europe see: ENUMERATE, http://enumerate.eu.
On the differences between archives and historians when it comes to social memory see: Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford 2011), especially 97-116.
See for the latter: Lev Manovich, 'Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data', in: Matthew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis 2012) 460-476, 460-461.
See: http://www.mpiwg-berlin. mpg.de/en/research/projects/DeptII-Aronova- Oertzen-Sepkoski-Historicizing/index-html.
Bernhard Rieder and Theo Röhle, 'Digital Methods: Five Challenges', in: David M. Berry (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (Houndmills 2012) 67-85, 70.
See the 'Forum' ('The End of the Humanities 1.0') in this issue, 145-180.
Andrew Prescott, 'The Deceptions of Data' (13 January 2013), http://digitalriffs.blogspot. nl/2013/01/the-deceptions-of-data.html.
See also: Manovich, 'Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data', 460-476, 469.
Frédéric Clavert, 'Lecture des sources historiennes à l'ère numérique' (14 November 2012), http://www.clavert. net/wordpress/?p=1061.
A good example of this limited view of digital history is for instance: Thomas Thiel, 'Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft: Mittel auf der Suche nach einem Zweck', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 11 February 2013.
Gibbs and Owens, 'The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing', paragraph 5.
Max Kemman, Martijn Kleppe and Stef Scagliola, 'Just Google It - Digital Research Practices of Humanities Scholars', ArXiv e-prints 1309.2434 (2013). See: http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2434.
See: Mark Vajcner, 'The Importance of Context for Digitised Archival Collections', Journal for the Association of History and Computing 11:1 (2008);
Andreas Fickers, 'Towards a New Digital Historicism?: Doing History in the Age of Abundance', Journal of European Television History and Culture 1:1 (2012).
A well-known resource is this University of Berkeley Library guide: Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html. A recent, and controversial, university course entitled Lying about the Past taught these skills by letting students themselves create historical hoaxes.
See the most recent course website here: http://globalaffairs.gmu.edu/ courses/1124/course-sections/6500.
Some discussion of the ensuing controversy can be found in this article: Yoni Appelbaum, 'How the Professor who fooled Wikipedia got caught by Reddit', The Atlantic, 15 May 2012, http://www.mpiwg-berlin. mpg.de/en/research/projects/ DeptII-Aronova-Oertzen-Sepkoski-Historicizing/index-html.
See Turkel on the importance of smell: William J. Turkel, 'Intervention: Hacking History, From Analogue to Digital and Back Again', Rethinking History 15:2 (2011) 287-296.
Prescott has used the example of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album to illustrate loss of knowledge, see: Andrew Prescott, 'An Electric Current of the Imagination: What the Digital Humanities are and What They might become', Journal of Digital Humanities 1:2(2012), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/ 1-2/an-electric-current-of-the-imagination-byandrew-prescott/. Some authors also speak about 'technology [...] as intensifying the experience of materiality'.
See: Marija Dalbello, 'A Genealogy of Digital Humanities', Journal of Documentation 67:3 (2011) 480-506, 494.
On the historical imagination see Munslow's useful essay in: Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (London 2006) 135-140.
Raymund Schütz, 'Historical Context and the Information Age: The Diaspora of Holocaust Archives' (unpublished paper, 8 June 2011).
This is mostly experimented with in the Europeana project. See: Stefan Gradmann, 'Europeana White Papers - Knowledge = Information in Context', Europeana White Papers (2011); http://group. europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/ whitepapers;
Bernhard Haslhofer, Elaheh Momeni Roochi, Manuel Gay and Rainer Simon, 'Augmenting Europeana Content with Linked Data Resources', in: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Semantic Systems (Graz 2010); http://eprints. cs.univie.ac.at/26/.
For more about this see: 'It's the Context Stupid', 14 July 2013, http://gerbenzaagsma.org/blog/14-07-2013/it's-context-stupid.
See: Hinke Piersma and Kees Ribbens' contribution to this issue, 78-102.
Patel, 'Zeitgeschichte im Digitalen Zeitalter. Neue und alte Herausforderungen'.
See for instance: Peter Haber, 'Twitter, Blogs und ein paar Konferenzen in den letzten Tagen': http://weblog.hist.net/archives/6084 (11 December 2012);
Mareike König, 'Twitter in der Wissenschaft. Ein Leitfaden für Historiker/innen', http://dhdhi.hypotheses.org/1072.
See for instance Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History.