Using digital media for furthering historical analysis, presentation, and research
Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data visualizations, interactive maps, timelines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D modeling, and big data analysis. By utilizing these resources, the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories.
Rooted in earlier social science history work, particularly around the history of enslavement in the United States, early digital history in the 1960s and 70s focused on using computers to conduct quantitative analyses, primarily of demographic and social history data - censuses, election returns, city directories, and other tabular or countable data. - with the aim of producing defensible research findings[1] These early computers could be programmed to conduct statistical analyses of these records, creating tallies, or seeking trends across records.[2] This research into historical demography was rooted in the rise of social history as a field of historical interest. The historians involved in this work sought to quantify past societies, to come to new conclusions about communities and population. Computers proved capable tools for that type of work. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, but the outpouring of quantitive studies by established scholars continued. Since then, quantitative history and cliometrics have been used primarily by historically minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded the Association for History and Computing. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s.[3]
The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks. In 1982, the Library of Congress embarked on its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its collection on to laserdiscs and CD-ROMs. The library started offering online exhibits in 1992 when it launched Selected Civil War Photographs. In 1993, Roy Rosenzweig, along with Steve Brier and Josh Brown, produced their award-winning CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, designed for Apple, Inc. that integrated images, text, film and sound clips, displayed in a visual interface that supported a text narrative.[4]
Among the earliest online digital history projects were The Heritage Project of the University of Kansas and medieval historian Dr. Lynn Nelson's World History Index and History Central Catalogue.[5] Another was The Valley of the Shadow, conceived in 1991 by current University of Richmond professor of humanities and president emeritus, Edward L. Ayers, who was then at the University of Virginia. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia adopted the Valley Project and partnered with IBM to collect and transcribe historical sources into digital files. The project collected data related to Augusta County in Virginia and Franklin County in Pennsylvania during the American Civil War. In 1996, William G. Thomas III joined Ayers on the Valley Project. Together, they produced an online article entitled "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," which also appeared in The American Historical Review in 2003.[6] A CD-ROM also accompanied the Valley Project, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2000.[7]
Rosenzweig, who died October 11, 2007,[8] founded the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University in 1994. Today, CHNM boasts several digital tools available to historians, such as Zotero, Omeka or Tropy. In 1997, Ayers and Thomas used the term "digital history" when they proposed and founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia, the earliest center devoted exclusively to history.[4] Several other institutions promoting digital history include the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online (MATRIX) at Michigan State University, Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. In 2004, Emory University launched Southern Spaces, a "peer-reviewed Internet journal and scholarly forum" examining the history of the South.
Applications
There are many potential benefits to the use of digital history when combined with traditional historical methods. Some of these applications include:
Combining traditional historical methods and new research methods in order to come to new conclusions.
Using different tools to extract and analyse larger amounts of data that would not be manageable otherwise.
Create models and maps of data extracted to create a visualisation of the data.
Data extracted and analysed can be placed alongside existing historiography to increase combined historical knowledge.
By adding new research methods to existing historical method, historians can benefit greatly from the ability to work with larger amounts of data and develop new interpretations from this.[9][10][11]
Notable projects
Example of historical research using digital means: network visualization of the ICIC archives, showing thousands of documents exchanged between League of Nations experts during the interwar period.
The collaborative nature of most digital history endeavors has meant that the discipline has developed primarily at institutions with the resources to sponsor content research and technical innovation. Two of the first centers, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia have been among the leaders in the development of digital history projects and the education of digital historians.
Some of the noteworthy projects emerging from these pioneering centers are The Geography of Slavery, The Texas Slavery Project, and The Countryside Transformed at VCDH and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution and The Lost Museum at the CHNM. In each of these projects, mediated archives holding multiple types of sources are combined with digital tools to analyze and illuminate an historical question to a varying degree; this integration of content and tools with analysis is one of the hallmarks of digital history—projects move beyond archives or collections and into scholarly analysis and the use of digital tools to develop that analysis. The differences between the ways projects incorporate these integrations are a measure of the development of the field and point to the ongoing debates over what digital history can and should be.
While many of the projects at VCDH, CHNM, and other university's centers have been geared towards academics and post-secondary education, the University of Victoria (British Columbia), in conjunction with the Université de Sherbrooke and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, has created as series of projects for all ages, "Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History." Laden with instructional aids, this site asks teachers to introduce students to historical research methods to help them develop analytical skills and a sense of the complexities of their national history. Issues of race, religion, and gender are addressed in carefully constructed modules that cover incidents in Canadian history from Viking exploration through the 1920s. One of the original co-creators of the project, John Lutz has also developed Victoria's Victoria[13] with the University of Victoria and Malaspina University-College.
In addition to Ayers, Thomas, Lutz, and Rosenzweig, numerous other individual scholars work with digital history techniques and have made and/or continue to make important contributions to the field. Robert Darnton's 2000 article, "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" was supplemented with electronic resources and is an early model of the discussions around digital history and its future in the humanities.[14] One of the first major digital projects to be reviewed by the American Historical Review (AHR) was Philip Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge"[15]—a multimedia exploration of changes to Los Angeles' physical profile over the course of several decades. Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh, developed the CD-ROM project "Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000." In the "African Slave Demography Project," Manning created a demographic simulation of the slave trade to show precisely how declined in West and Central Africa between 1730 and 1850 as well as in East Africa between the years 1820 and 1890 due to slavery.[16] Jan Reiff, of UCLA, co-edited the print and online versions of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Andrew J. Torget, founded the Texas Slavery Project while at VCDH and continues to develop the site as he completes his PhD—likely a model for new digital scholars who will incorporate digital components into larger research agendas.
Another notable project that makes use of digital tools for historical practice is The Quilt Index.[17] As scholars became increasingly interested in women's history, quilts became valuable to study. The Quilt Index is an online collaborative database where quilt owners can upload pictures and data about their quilts. This project was created due to the difficulty of collecting quilts. Firstly, they were in the possession of various institutions, archives, and even civilians. And secondly, they can be too fragile or bulky for physical transport.
Also in the field of women's history is Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution. which highlights the collective action and individual achievements of women from the 1940s to the present.[18] In the UK, a pilot project began in 2002 to create a digital library of British History.[19] This has developed into an extensive collection of over 1,200 volumes, bringing together primary and secondary sources from libraries, archives, museums and academics. Another significant project is the Old Bailey Online, a digital collection of all proceedings between 1674 and 1913.[20] In addition to the digitized records, the Old Bailey Online website provides historical and legal background information, research guides, and educational resources for students.
Digital history is now a common course type in graduate and undergraduate curriculum. For example, the students in Digital History courses at the University of Hertfordshire have learned skills in digital mapping and Python programming, which makes it more accessible and easier to analyse large quantities of source data. One project that the class worked on included analyzing the trends, patterns, and relationships of data related to weather, crime, and poverty. This allowed students to use their traditional history skills to evaluate the significance of their findings. Another project was using digital mapping to compare the differences between various groups of students who studied at Oxford derived from British History Online. Similarly, at Cal State East Bay, history majors meet in the science building's computer lab to go over new and old software that could be used for the creation or presentation of history.
Technology
Digital technology tools arrange ideas and promote the unique analysis of data, with many tools previously unavailable to historians opening new avenues for collaboration, text mining, and big data analysis. In addition, digital history offers tools for the presentation and access to historical knowledge online.
Digital historians may use web development tools, such as WYSIWYGHTML-editor Adobe Dreamweaver. Other tools create more interactive digital history, such as Databases, which provide greater capacity for information storage and retrieval in a definable way. Databases with features like Structured Query Language (SQL) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) arrange materials in a formal manner and allow precise searching for keywords, dates, and other data characteristics. The online article "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" used XML for presenting and connecting evidence with detailed historiographical discussions. The Valley of the Shadow project also employed XML to convert all of the archive's letters, diaries, and newspapers for full text searching capabilities. Coding languages such as Python may be used in order to digitally sort and filter data, whilst Google Fusion Tables can be used for the geographical mapping of data.
Digital historians may use content management systems (CSM) to store their digital collection that includes audio, visual, images and text for an online web display. Examples of these systems include: Drupal, WordPress, and Omeka.[21]
The Differences Slavery Made also used geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze and understand the spatial arrangement of social structures. For the article, Ayers and Thomas created many new maps through GIS technology to produce detailed images of Augusta and Franklin counties never before possible. GIS and its many components remain helpful for studying history and visualizing change over time.
The Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project at MIT develops robust, open source tools that enable access, management, and envisaging digital assets. Among the many tools built by SIMILE, the Timeline tool, which employs a DHTML-based AJAXy widget, allows digital historians to create dynamic, customizable timelines for visualizing time-based events. The Timeline page on the SIMILE website declares that their tool "is like Google Maps for time-based information." Additionally, SIMILE's Exhibit tool boasts a customizable structure for sorting and presenting data.[22] Exhibit, written in JavaScript, creates interactive, data-rich web pages without the need for any programming or database creation knowledge.
Textual analysis software allows historians to make new use of old sources by finding patterns in large collections of documents or even just analyzing a source for frequency of terms. Textual analysis software allows historians to "text mine", or easily find correlations and themes in the documents.[citation needed] There are several textual-analysis programs available online, from sophisticated ones that allow the researcher to tailor the program to handle large amounts of data, like MALLET,[23] and straightforward programs like TokenX,[24] which generates word-frequency lists and word clouds to illustrate language usage and significance, to basic ones like Wordle,[25] which offers simple visualizations of word frequency and relationships. Some websites provide textual analysis on their content automatically. Online bookmarking and research tool del.icio.us uses tag clouds to visually depict the frequency and importance of user-generated tags, and the recently instituted Google Ngram Viewer allows viewers to search the commonality of textual themes by year.
However, with the development of digital history and the technology used to produce it, there has been questions raised over the validity of it. One such issue, is that raised by Jean Francois Baudrillard. He says that "Western Culture introduced significant modifications to the way it produced the real, by intensifying it and heightening it into a domain of reality in hyperspace: hyper-reality".[26]
The Perseus Digital Library, formerly known as the Perseus Project, is a free-access digital library founded by Gregory Crane in 1987 and hosted by the Department of Classical Studies of Tufts University. One of the pioneers of digital libraries, its self-proclaimed mission is to make the full record of humanity available to everyone. While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation. The current version, Perseus 4.0, is also known as the Perseus Hopper, and is mirrored by the University of Chicago.
The Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech was a research institute specializing in bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology. The institute had more than 250 personnel, including over 50 tenured and research faculty. Research at the institute involved collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology and medicine. The institute developed -omic and bioinformatic tools and databases that can be applied to the study of human, animal and plant diseases as well as the discovery of new vaccine, drug and diagnostic targets.
Quantitative history is a method of historical research that uses quantitative, statistical and computer resources. It is a type of the social science history and has four major journals: Historical Methods, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the Social Science History, and Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provides Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications development, and networked publishing facilities. It cultivates partnerships and participates in humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information technology companies, scholarly organizations, and other groups residing at the intersection of computers and cultural heritage.
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), formerly the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), is a research center specializing in digital history and information technology at George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was one of the first digital history centers in the world, established by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994 to use digital media and information technology to democratize history: to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Its current director is Lincoln Mullen.
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
Roy Alan Rosenzweig was an American historian. He was the founder and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University from 1994 until his death in October 2007 from lung cancer, aged 57. After his death, the center was renamed the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media in his honor.
Digital classics is the application of the tools of digital humanities to the field of classics, or more broadly to the study of the ancient world.
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
The Quilt Index is a searchable database for scholars, quilters and educators featuring over 50,000 quilts from documentation projects, museums, libraries, and private collections. It also has quilt-related ephemera and curated essays and lesson plans for teachers.
Cultural analytics refers to the use of computational, visualization, and big data methods for the exploration of contemporary and historical cultures. While digital humanities research has focused on text data, cultural analytics has a particular focus on massive cultural data sets of visual material – both digitized visual artifacts and contemporary visual and interactive media. Taking on the challenge of how to best explore large collections of rich cultural content, cultural analytics researchers developed new methods and intuitive visual techniques that rely on high-resolution visualization and digital image processing. These methods are used to address both the existing research questions in humanities, to explore new questions, and to develop new theoretical concepts that fit the mega-scale of digital culture in the early 21st century.
Teachinghistory.org, also known as the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC), is a website that provides educational resources for the study of U.S. history.
Computational musicology is an interdisciplinary research area between musicology and computer science. Computational musicology includes any disciplines that use computation in order to study music. It includes sub-disciplines such as mathematical music theory, computer music, systematic musicology, music information retrieval, digital musicology, sound and music computing, and music informatics. As this area of research is defined by the tools that it uses and its subject matter, research in computational musicology intersects with both the humanities and the sciences. The use of computers in order to study and analyze music generally began in the 1960s, although musicians have been using computers to assist them in the composition of music beginning in the 1950s. Today, computational musicology encompasses a wide range of research topics dealing with the multiple ways music can be represented.
The Texas Slavery Project is a digital history project created by Andrew J. Torget, currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. It aims to explore the expansion of slavery between the years 1837 and 1845 in the lands in and around what would eventually become the state of Texas. It has been listed as among "the best and most important new work" in the developing digital history medium. The project was presented at the 2007 Nebraska Digital Workshop held by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The Chinese Text Project is a digital library project that assembles collections of early Chinese texts. The name of the project in Chinese literally means "The Chinese Philosophical Book Digitization Project", showing its focus on books related to Chinese philosophy. It aims at providing accessible and accurate versions of a wide range of texts, particularly those relating to Chinese philosophy, and the site is credited with providing one of the most comprehensive and accurate collections of classical Chinese texts on the Internet, as well as being one of the most useful textual databases for scholars of early Chinese texts.
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is an international research center that works with humanities in the 21st century. A collaboration among the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology, MITH cultivates research agendas clustered around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games and virtual worlds.
The project Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan promotes research on the writing and language of pre-Hispanic Maya culture. It is housed in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn and was established with funding from the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. The project has a projected run-time of fifteen years and is directed by Nikolai Grube from the Department of Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn. The goal of the project is to conduct computer-based studies of all extant Maya hieroglyphic texts from an epigraphic and cultural-historical standpoint, and to produce and publish a database and a comprehensive dictionary of the Classic Mayan language.
Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. It supports scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities, but also by students and the general public. It can be used to analyze online texts or ones uploaded by users. Voyant has a large, international user base: in October 2016 alone, Voyant's main server had 81,686 page views originating from 156 countries, invoking the tool 1,173,252 times.
Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) is an online project for discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records in regard to individual people, families, and organizations.
Lou Burnard is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) from 2001 to September 2010, when he officially retired from OUCS. Before that, he was manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at OUCS for five years. He has worked in ICT support for research in the humanities since the 1990s. He was one of the founding editors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and continues to play an active part in its maintenance and development, as a consultant to the TEI Technical Council and as an elected TEI board member. He has played a key role in the establishment of many other activities and initiatives in this area, such as the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service and the British National Corpus, and has published and lectured widely. Since 2008 he has worked as a Member of the Conseil Scientifique for the CNRS-funded "Adonis" TGE.
Battershill, Claire, and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).
Bell, Johnny, et al. "'History is a conversation': teaching student historians through making digital histories." History Australia 13.3 (2016): 415–430.
Lutz, John Sutton. 2007. Bed Jumping and Compelling Convergences in Historical Computing. Digital History portal, Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Rosenzweig, Roy. "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review 108 (June 2003): 735–62.
Rosenzweig, Roy and Michael O'Malley. "Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web," Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 132–55.
Rosenzweig, Roy and Michael O'Malley. "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web," Journal of American History 88 (September 2001): 548–79.
Rusert, Britt. "New World: The Impact of Digitization on the Study of Slavery." American Literary History 29.2 (2017): 267–286.
Salmi, Hannu. What is Digital History? Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
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