Facing the History Machine: Why Histories of Digital History Matter

With the advent of AI in the last few years, historians are grappling with the question of how these new tools will affect historical knowledge production. Yet questioning the impact of new technologies on the profession is hardly new. For decades, historians have raised fundamental epistemological and methodological questions when confronted with new technologies, yet this is often forgotten in favor of a rhetoric of radical newness and future promises. Recent scholarship is beginning to change this, however. As the praxeological turn in the history of the humanities and historiography has taken hold over the past two decades, scholars have begun to investigate the role of technology in the creation of historical knowledge. More recently, the history of digital history has emerged as a new avenue of research. Nonetheless, the strongest interest in the history of digital history manifests in the history of the humanities and the history of knowledge, and not in the field itself.

This talk will explore the genealogies of digital history, set within the broader context of how new technologies have shaped historical research practices and knowledge production since at least the late nineteenth century. As I will argue, attending to the history of digital history should be integral to the field. Fifteen years ago, Christine Borgman noted the lack of historicizing studies of the practices of (digital) humanists, drawing a contrast with the sciences which could advance precisely because there was a disciplinary memory and tradition of building upon accumulated knowledge from the past to advance research in the present. Yet decades of publications, events and debates relating to the human-machine encounter in historical research appear to have had only a limited impact on current debates and practices in our field. To remedy this lack of transmission of accumulated knowledge and expertise and understand what is new in the era of digital history, we need a self-understanding that is genuinely grounded in history.

At the same time, the history of digital history is also a key part of the history of historiography more broadly. Historical research has never only been the work of the mind or a function of shifting historiographical trends and philosophies of history; the investigation of its practices has been a topic since the work of Michel de Certeau in the 1970s, and especially since the late 1990s. However, the question of how technology, not narrowly understood with Schatzberg as tools but as material practices shaped by human agency, fits into that broader investigation of scholarly practices is a newer concern. As such, excavating the history of digital history will not only ground the field historically, but help us better understand how technology has shaped our discipline of History as a whole.