Despite the relatively new field of digital history, the exponential growth of technology over the past 60 years and interest in digital history has allowed for patterns throughout the field of digital scholarship to emerge. The great names of early digital scholars like Edward Ayers and Richard White alongside the success of projects like “Valley of the Shadow” has created a blueprint for anyone wishing to enter the world of digital history. This blueprint can be visualized throughout the digital historiography by breaking down the work done by prominent scholars in the early years of digital history and their influence on how data is utilized by historians to show narrative and temporal changes throughout history. However, these grand projects that shaped the early years of digital history and the growth of the field in recent decades have been met with critical eyes from historians who see the field itself as one that has evolved with technological developments in many ways to share never before analyzed information and yet, still has many limitations and issues within the field that need to be addressed.

            As discussed in The Historian’s Macroscope by Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart, digital history has thrived from the ability to meticulously break down large collections of data into narratives, however the large sets of data that are continuously analyzed in digital scholarship has remained outside the “mainstream profession”(Graham, Milligan, Weingart, 12). The significant efforts that have gone into trying to make sense of the ever-increasing digital archives of history now available throughout the digital and online has been used in a variety of approaches to show both narrative and temporal changes to great success. While projects like Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 utilizes interactive tools that allow users to engage with sources and maps surrounding slave revolts in new and interesting ways. This and other projects like Land Grab U use similar formats of open access map manipulation to share information in both a narrative and temporal manner.

            Another pattern within this field is the focus on marginalized voices. The cornerstone projects that have gained the most attention throughout the field have focused on elevating marginalized voices and sharing narratives that have not been seen in any other way but through the use of big data as a way to search through sources and view patterns on a macroscopic level. However, although the importance of these narratives being studied should not be dismissed there have been criticisms about the manner in which these narratives are approached and displayed in public facing projects. According to Jessica Marie Johnson in her article Markup Bodies, much of the “advocacy” that is supposedly taking place by sharing the realities of oppression for marginalized groups are merely reproducing oppression and or forwarding the commodification of pain rather than forwarding understanding and moving towards inclusion (Johnson, 58-59).

            Examining the field of digital history scholarship and attempting to visualize its growth since its earliest stages in the mid-20th century is possible through a macro and micro lens in probably several different formats. From a “family tree” of historians themselves to a spatial examination of where digital history is a rising interest in certain academic circles. However, I believe that topic modeling would make the most sense for a historiographical visualization. Within this visualization the criticisms and comments of historians both the “great men” and the work of revisionist historians who have worked within the field and have criticized it in recent years could be shown in an almost tree-like format that could analyze the concerns and research interests throughout the decades and years that digital history has operated in the professional world of history.

Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 1 December 2018; 36 (4 (137)): 57–79. 

Sharon M. Leon, “Complicating a ‘Great Man’ Narrative of Digital History in the United States.” In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, 344–66. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope, First Edition. Imperial College Press.

Cameron Blevins, “Valley of the Shadow and the Digital Archive Project.” Posted Dec. 19, 2009. https://www.cameronblevins.org/posts/valley-of-the-shadow-and-the-digital-database/.

Vincent Brown, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761,” Harvard University, 2012. http://revolt.axismaps.com/.

Robert Lee, “Morrill Act of 1862 Indigenous Land Parcels Database,” High Country News, March 2020. https://landgrabu.org/.