Framing Histories of Digital History: The Role of Transnational Networks

This paper is related to my current book project, which explores the history and genealogies of digital history, set within the broader context of the ways in which technology has shaped historical research practices and knowledge production since the late 19th century. My paper focuses on a key aspect: the circulation and diìusion of knowledge among transnational networks of computing historians, the ways in which these networks were constituted and their transformative inîuence on historical knowledge production.

The paper will discuss the pre-history of the íeld we now call ‘digital history’ by providing:
1) An overall framework for a history (or histories) of digital history, and,
2) A concrete case study to illustrate this framework: the írst international ‘digital’ history conference, History and the Computer, which was held in Uppsala in 1973.

If an imagined ‘collective’ memory about the history of digital history can be said to exist, it is a history that started in the 1960s in the US and Western Europe, involved mostly digital electronic computing employed in support of quantitative approaches, and took place within national silos. As I will argue, at least íve dimensions need closer attention if we are to move towards more comprehensive and integrative histories of digital history: a shift in focus from technologies to practices, an expansion of the temporal as well as geographical scope of the inquiry, much more attention for the role of networks and transnational exchange and, ínally, for its political dimensions.

In the post-WWII period, historians began to use analogue and later digital computing in the United States, Western Europe and the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union against the backdrop of the Cold War and a general surge in the use of computing in various humanities disciplines. By the late 1960s, we began to see the establishment of networks and structures to support what could be called an emerging transnational íeld of computing historians: the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Moscow (1970) and the International History and the Computer Conference in Uppsala (1973) would become key platforms for knowledge exchange. The 1973 Uppsala conference, in particular, foreshadowed many later developments; it brought together historians from ‘East’ and ‘West’ who, ideological motivations and Cold War constraints notwithstanding, managed to índ common methodological ground while eschewing politics. After the advent of micro- and personal computing in the early 1980s, new user generations of computing historians, again from ‘East’ and ‘West’, formed the International Association for History and Computing (1987-2005).

The aim of the paper is to show how the transnational circulation and diìusion of knowledge within transnational networks is key to understanding technology’s transformative impacts on historical knowledge production in the 20th century and indispensable to understanding the emergence of the íeld of digital history around the 2000s.