According to Adam Crymble in his book Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age, the beginnings of the field of digital history comes from the roots of humanities computing. Crymble defines this research as the idea of approaching historical research as “an argument-driven, evidence-based question about the past” that can be understood utilizing technology or “algorithmic thinking [to apply] certain principles of problem solving to evidence, in search of a solution” (Crymble, 22). This means that the digital humanities differ from traditional research because of the manner of their investigation; examining quantifiable data rather than the qualitative data that many other fields prefer to focus on when investigating their research questions.

Of course, despite the term “computing” lending itself to the digital age, humanities computing dates farther back in the historiography than the birth of PLCs and listservs. Early antiquarians as far back as the 17^th century have analyzed economic sources to examine population trends and movements of people in prior centuries. (Crymble, 24). With the growth of social history in the early half of the 20^th century, historians like those of the Annales school have utilized economic and farming records to understand vast quantities of information and the histories of large populations or movements in a manageable way. (Crymble, 24).

The introduction of computers following the end of WWII allowed for larger amounts of data to be broken down into numbers or repetitive sequences and understood in a shorter amount of time than simply having a person examine each individual document in a collection by hand. Rapid development in more sophisticated computing technology and academics becoming interested in computers as devices to assist in historical research and data-crunching led to the true beginnings of what we now refer to as the field of digital history. The use of quantitative data for historical research in the early decades of computing humanities was not without its problems. The lack of communication between researchers and technology that relied on sharing data in the form of punch cards and magnetic tape caused repetition in the work that was being done. By the mid 1970s however, this was changing with the management and storage of computational work becoming an important enough issue that university projects to consolidate and store data like the Oxford Text Archive were set up and funded. With the creation of the Internet, the sources that were once only available in archives were now becoming more widely accessible to historians worldwide thus giving rise to the digital age. (Hockey)

After understanding how the two fields developed and the similarities between the two, it is important to acknowledge that humanities computing is different from digital humanities. While digital humanities utilize and create new tools to examine historical questions, the “digital” aspect of the field comes from the use of technologies like computers as a medium through which to create and publish their work. I would argue that humanities computing focuses more on the analysis of data and the breakdown of quantitative aspects of data, such as metadata, along with cataloguing and filtering the historical record in such a way as to make historical arguments. Digital history still finds ways to make qualitative arguments while humanities computing is truly a numbers game.

The ability to communicate across the globe with the emergence of these new digital technologies has fostered an environment that encourages collaboration amongst academics and led to projects that reach larger audiences and are more widely accessible to academics and the public alike. However with this growth of the field has come concern over the true professionalization of the field, with traditional historians pushing back against the idea that digital history is “real history.” (Spiro, Ch. 3) Organizations like the American Historical Association have assisted in defining and professionalizing the field through the publication of articles like that of Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas’s “What Is Digital History?” that create guidelines and share examples of digital history projects that have been published and awarded some form of recognition for the in-depth and unique interpretations they have argued. Unlike traditional humanities, digital humanities include an interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars outside the ivory tower of academia. This includes academics outside the humanities such as anthropologists, or museum professionals, among others (Spiro, Ch. 3).

Now debate within the field of digital humanities, and computation by extension of the “digital umbrella” this field has fallen under, has begun as the field attempts to define the reputation and structure of the field more clearly. Every day there are new technologies introduced, more sources digitized, and more projects created. As the field continues to be debated, new scholars growing up in the digital age now have more access than ever before to sources, projects, and a greater understanding of the capabilities of the online and digital world. As Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig encouraged, the greater the understanding of the digital world and the more use the digital tools and projects created get, the more flexible and diverse the understanding of the past. This new immersive and “hands-on” history will lead to dramatic changes within the field of digital humanities and maybe even the shape of traditional history as a whole.

Bibliography

Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig, “Introduction: Promises and Perils of Digital History,” in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Presenting, and Preserving the Past on the Web, 2006.

Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian : Transformations in the Digital Age. Westmont: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Accessed January 17, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Hockey, Susan. “The History of Computing” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH.

Seefeldt, Douglas and WIlliam G. Thomas. “What Is Digital History?” AHA Perspectives, May 1, 2009.

Spiro, Lisa. “This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2012, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Web.