Tracing the History of Digital History as Global History

This paper traces the circulation of technological knowledge and expertise among transnational networks of historians in the post-WWII period. Though having clear prewar antecedents, this transnational circulation of knowledge became especially salient in the 1950s and 1960s when historians begin to use analog and later digital computing in the United States, Western Europe and the communist bloc, 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 begin to see the establishment of communicative spaces and networks to support what could be called an emerging transnational field of computing historians. Following the advent of micro- and personal computing in the early 1980s, the influx of new user generations of computing historians led to the formation of the almost forgotten International Association for History and Computing in 1987. Its final conference took place in 2005, at a time when the transition to the field we now call ‘digital history’ was well underway.

The paper will argue that probing these transnational connections, networks and broader processes of field formation is key to understanding technology’s transformative impacts on historical knowledge production in the 20th century, and indispensable to understanding the emergence of the field of digital history in the early 2000s. As digital approaches are a logical companion of global history, the history and genealogies of digital history itself offer a prime example to illustrate the point.