Doing Digital History

This book is a practical introduction to digital history. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction to how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. Doing digital history covers the entire life-cycle of a digital project, from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as XML. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools.

"This is an important book that fills an important niche: a careful and comprehensive report to the field on the development and possibilities of online history."—Stephen Brier, Associate Provost and Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies, Graduate Center, CUNY

A practical guide to digital history, which shows just how much can be done without writing any code. This book will give researchers in history or related fields the skills and confidence to approach existing digital resources and to create their own. Assuming no prior knowledge, the guide focuses on hands-on techniques for working with text.

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.

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

An original methodological framework for approaching the archived web, both as a source and as an object of study in its own right. As life continues to move online, the web becomes increasingly important as a source for understanding the past. But historians have yet to formulate a methodology for approaching the archived web as a source of study. How should the history of the present be written? In this book, Niels Brügger offers an original methodological framework for approaching the web of the past, both as a source and as an object of study in its own right. While many studies of the web focus solely on its use and users, Brügger approaches the archived web as a semiotic, textual system in order to offer the first book-length treatment of its scholarly use. While the various forms of the archived web can challenge researchers' interactions with it, they also present a range of possibilities for interpretation. The Archived Web identifies characteristics of the online web that are significant now for scholars, investigates how the online web became the archived web, and explores how the particular digitality of the archived web can affect a historian's research process. Brügger offers suggestions for how to translate traditional historiographic methods for the study of the archived web, focusing on provenance, creating an overview of the archived material, evaluating versions, and citing the material. The Archived Web lays the foundations for doing web history in the digital age, offering important and timely guidance for today's media scholars and tomorrow's historians.

Digital history is an emerging field that draws on digital technology and computational methods. A global enterprise that invites scholars worldwide to join forces, it presents exciting and novel ways we might explore, understand and represent the past. Hannu Salmi provides the most compelling introduction to digital history to date. Beginning with an examination of the origins of the digital study of history, he goes on to discuss the question of how history exists in a digitized form. He introduces basic concepts and ideas in digital history, including databases and archives, interdisciplinarity and public engagement. Outlining the problems and methods in the study of big data, both textual and visual, particular attention is paid to the born-digital era: the contemporary age that exists primarily in digital form. What is Digital History? is essential reading for students of history and other humanities fields, as well as anyone interested in how digitization and digital cultures are transforming the study of history.

This puplication looks at how the digital age is affecting the field of history for both scholars and students. The book does not seek either to applaud or condemn digital technologies, but takes a more conceptual view of how the field of history is being changed by the digital age.