Abstract
Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action’, where its focus is shifting from the building of resources towards the making of new historical knowledge. This also involves novel challenges that digital methods pose to historical research, including awareness of the pitfalls and limitations of the digital tools and the necessity of new forms of digital source criticisms. Through its combination of empirical, conceptual and contextual studies, Digital Histories is a timely and pioneering contribution taking stock of how digital research currently advances historical scholarship.
Highlights
Historians are very good at source criticism, but in the digital era this requires good provenance data
The evacuees in the MiKARELIA database we used here were from areas west and north of Lake Ladoga, which are the regions Finland lost to the Soviet Union
People placed in less populated areas were less likely to remain and more likely to return to Karelia
Summary
Historians are very good at source criticism, but in the digital era this requires good provenance data. I will analyse different digital data types and infrastructures from the point of view of a historian and discuss the needs of historical research and knowledge creation. This chapter contributes to the historical revision of allemansrätten by studying public uses of the concept in Finland in the 20th century. Such a broad study is possible using the recently digitised documents of the Finnish Parliament, which offer a unique view on how central societal concepts have been defined and used in public discussion. What new knowledge can we uncover about a well-studied historical phenomenon if we combine the use of non-traditional source material, in this case metadata from an image database catalogue, with a non-traditional historical methodology, namely, social network analysis?
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