As an introduction to the field of Digital History, the Virtual AHA panel on the future of digital history as a field of study gave a wonderful summary with several takeaways for someone like myself, who is more unfamiliar with the Digital History field.

Of course I say that, but I have been unknowingly engaging in digital history since I first began my career as a serious history student and examining the publications of historians in the Current Research in Digital History journal shares just how widespread the use of digital tools within the field actually is. After a cursory glance through the publications on the CRDH site, I selected several that jumped out at me to actually look through and read.

One of the first articles I examined was Marcy L. Galbreath and Amy L. Giroux’s examination of 4-H manuals and other agricultural guide books in their article “Researching Genres in Agricultural Communities: The Role of the Farm Record Book.” I chose this article primarily for the content of the article itself. As a lover of food and agriculture, and as someone who knows just how fascinating farm manuals from the 20th century actually are (of course I analyze them for information about growing techniques and the advice on what particular crops and livestock) I was really excited to learn just how they were accessing digitized sources and where these resources were. From Galbreath and Giroux’s article I learned that they had been using a digital tool that they created called Historical Agricultural News that assisted in a targeted search of the database Chronicling America, a digitization project which is sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Rifling through historic newspapers is not an unfamiliar task, in the age of COVID and largely web-based resources it is a necessity for completing any kind of historical research, and being able to narrow a search to get the information that you want is a key part of one’s training during their undergraduate study. Even so, there is still so much information that has been digitized that getting to a narrow search and finding exactly what you want is a difficult process, especially when you don’t know the exact words you need to find precise and useful sources.

During the AHA panel, Ian Milligan mentions how digital history is an important tool that students should be trained in, in the pandemic/post-pandemic world and the information that is digitized should accessed as a resource in a way that can actually be utilized critically by students throughout their academic careers.  He discusses how the mass of digitized sources is sometimes so vast that it can be unwieldy and that not only the presence of sources needs to be analyzed but also the absence.

            Creating a tool to assist in narrowing the sources within a vast database, especially a national database, is incredibly useful and a wonderful way to make digitized information available to the greater historical community and public. Through the creation of tools like Historical Agricultural News, sources can be analyzed and interpreted in different ways, through the sheer fact that they are now known and “findable.”

Of course this doesn’t mean that tools like Chronicling America are completely useless, and I don’t mean to make it sound as if I am lauding praises on specific tools. Vilja Hulden’s article “News Diets: Main Courses and Side Dishes,” utilizes Chronicling America as a starting point for understanding reprinted material in national and local newspapers. The results were then modeled to show how much original vs. reprinted material was present in newspapers over the course of two different time periods, one period of one year, and one period of two years.

These two papers and their use of Chronicling America as a starting point to further research show that there is use in large digital databases and that they can be manipulated in different ways. Both of these research publications seem to ask the same question: maybe it isn’t so much the content of small-scale individual articles but rather the importance of the construction of the database itself that should be examined?

This not a unique way of analyzing large databases and in Jo Guldi and Benjamin Williams article “Synthesis and Lage-Scale Textual Corpora: A Nested Topic Model of Britain’s Debates over Landed Property in the Nineteenth Century,” the parliamentary archive, is browken down through a technique that Guldi and Willams refer to as “nesting” that makes the “millions and millions” of speeches more understandable for historians attempting to process these different topics as data.

For a project that uses a library as vast as political debates in Parliament, the nesting of topics to understand content seems like an incredibly useful tool and once again breaks down the consistent theme in research of attempting to make large amounts of sources, i.e. data, more understandable for historians. Rather than looking at the content of sources, it uses the speed of computers and search engines to process keywords and, for lack of a better phrase, “organize” written historical sources.

The AHA panel discusses this when they turn to the topic of labor and who should be doing the work of digitizing creating/managing digital tools. Zoe LeBlanc begins her discussion of labor with a reminder that there are librarians and archivists doing much of the work of digitizing but then learning the tools of digital history falls on only a small number of history professionals who are teaching and doing the work of Digital History. I can understand the frustration of being a small collection of historians who are working on an emerging field but hopefully through the continued growth of the discipline, which I think will continue to happen in this era of growing digital globalization, the amount of work will continue to be spread out. As Digital History becomes more accepted as its own field, the collaboration will transition into shared responsibility for curation, management, and maintenance of digital tools. As a note, I thought it was so interesting that LeBlanc brought up the sunsetting of some digital tools because I immediately thought of my favorite: eTurabian, a fabulous Chicago/Turabian citation tool, a lot like Zotero, that was archived in 2019 and disappeared from the internet in 2022. Rest in Peace eTurabian, you are the reason I passed undergrad.

Galbreath, Marcy L. and Amy L. Giroux”Researching Genres in Agricultural Communities: The Role of the Farm Record Book.” Current Research in Digital History 1 (August 27, 2018 2018). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2018.16. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-16-researching-genres-in-agricultural-communities/.

Guldi, Jo and Benjamin Williams. “Synthesis and Large-Scale Textual Corpora: A Nested Topic Model of Britain’s Debates over Landed Property in the Nineteenth Century.” Current Research in Digital History 1 (August 27, 2018 2018). https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2018.01. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-01-synthesis-and-large-scale-textual-corpora/.

Hulden, Vilja. “News Diets: Main Courses and Side Dishes.” [In English]. Journal Article. Current Research in Digital History 3 (October 28, 2020 2020). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2020.04.

Arguing with Digital History Group. “Digital History and Argument.” 30. Roy Roszenweig Center for History and New Media: Roy Roszenweig Center for History and New Media, November 13, 2017 2017. white paper.

Association, American Historical. “Future Directions in Research and Training for Digital History.” YouTube, February 16, 2021, 2021.