Abstract
Digital humanities seem to be omnipresent these days and the discipline of history is no exception. This introduction is concerned with the changing practice of ‘doing’ history in the digital age, seen within a broader historical context of developments in the digital humanities and ‘digital history’. It argues that there is too much emphasis on tools and data while too little attention is being paid to how doing history in the digital age is changing as a result of the digital turn. This tendency towards technological determinism needs to be balanced by more attention to methodological and epistemological considerations. The article offers a short survey of history and computing since the 1960s with particular attention given to the situation in the Netherlands, considers various definitions of ‘digital history’ and argues for an integrative view of historical practice in the digital age that underscores hybridity as its main characteristic. It then discusses some of the major changes in historical practice before outlining the three major themes that are explored by the various articles in this thematic issue – digitisation and the archive, digital historical analysis, and historical knowledge (re)presentation and audiences. This article is part of the special issue 'Digital History'.
Highlights
Argues for an integrative view of historical practice in the digital age that underscores hybridity as its main characteristic. It discusses some of the major changes in historical practice before outlining the three major themes that are explored by the various articles in this thematic issue – digitisation and the archive, digital historical analysis, and historical knowledgepresentation and audiences
Le Roy Ladurie was not alone in asserting that tackling new questions with new methods should be the rationale underlying the use of computers in historical research
One would assume that the current avalanche of digitised, as well as born digital primary sources and ‘big data’, enables scholars to realise the potential envisioned by Le Roy Ladurie and Busa
Summary
[...] en histoire, comme ailleurs, ce qui compte, ce n’est pas la machine, mais le problème. Le Roy Ladurie was not alone in asserting that tackling new questions with new methods should be the rationale underlying the use of computers in historical research. His words were echoed in 1980 by digital humanist avant la lettre Roberto Busa who, looking back upon his life’s work that had begun in 1949, remarked that ‘the use of computers in the humanities has as its principal aim the enhancement of the quality, depth and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time’.5. To use a linguistic analogy, while a small group of researchers seems to have successfully embarked upon a process of créolisation, many historians have not on digital history
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