Doing media history in a digital age: change and continuity in historiographical practices

Abstract

This article explores the challenges which digital media brings into the field of media history. It starts out by examining prominent television historians’ understanding of digital archives as revolutionizing media historiography. These claims are examined by holding them up against texts that discuss wider issues in historiographical practices related to television history and transnational comparisons. This investigation is paired with my own experiences and the many methodological challenges I have encountered using digitalized sources for my new research. I end up concluding that digital archives in themselves make little difference to scholarly media history. In light of the lacking impact, I argue that we should study the cultural economy of these archives to better understand the corporate, political, and economical structures that govern their content and which also set the course for online digital processes that are active history-producing entities themselves.