Digital Public History Inside and Outside the Box

Enrica Salvatori

doi:10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2020/02/003

Abstract

The relationship between history and information technology is long and troubled. Many projects have opened and closed, many pioneering initiatives have achieved success and attention, but often they have not ‘taught’ or left a fruitful legacy. These experiments, studies and conferences have built a rich basis for the relationship between the disciplines, but the difficult connection needs to be further explored. Although no digital history research centres exist in Italy nowadays, it is possible to look at several Italian projects in order to discuss the strange position of the digital issue within public history conferences, the place of history in the large digital humanities environment and finally the definition itself of digital history.

Highlights

The heterogeneity of computational literary studies (CLS) can render it difficult to map
In an article published in Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (2004) which analyses forty seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems, Burrows divides his 150 chosen most frequent words (MFWs) into three groups based on subjective readings of their function and applies Delta to each of them separately, trying to identify which of the three cohorts could be considered to be more denotative of authorship as compared with genre (Burrows 2004)
If we look at the wide sector of the digital editions of texts, it is obvious that these publications always facilitate historical research, but there is a clear difference between an edition built to study linguistic data and one that highlights the elements of greatest historical relevance

Summary

Introduction

The heterogeneity of computational literary studies (CLS) can render it difficult to map. This paper will make an effort to marshal a significant proportion of the field’s research output into an historical narrative which is capable of encompassing developments underway in the field since the early sixties It is in the eighties and nineties that we begin to see previously regnant methods consistently outperformed by multivariate approaches in which ~100 of the most frequent words (MFWs) in a text are quantified. In the oughts and tens CLS scholars extended these methods further, analysing thousands of words and treating texts more or less in their entirety In accounting for these three phases, this chapter will emphasise particular works of scholarship which have been instrumental in transforming one epoch into the next. It is not until the success of John Burrows’ Delta method that this notion begins to be challenged

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Conclusion