As long as new preservation technologies and computing machines have been developed, the question of their utility and uptake in historical research practices has been debated. Yet, the very fact that historical knowledge production has always been affected by new and emerging technologies is often forgotten. Similarly, the fact that key epistemological and methodological questions in what we now call ‘digital history’ were already debated decades ago by earlier generations of computing historians (analog and digital) is mostly overlooked. It seems as if every new generation of historians rediscovers the promise of ‘digital history’, with all of its attending hopes, visions and ambitions for reinventing and reshaping historical research.
This rhetoric of radical newness is not unique to digital history but, as Nyhan, Flinn and Welsh have shown, a general feature of much discourse about digital humanities in the past twenty years (Nyhan, Flinn and Welsh 2015). They warn that without an understanding of the history of computing in the humanities, “we are condemned to repeat the revolutionary trope ad infinitum” and succumb to a superficial and “evolutionary model of progress” in which that complex history is effectively erased. In order to ground our current ‘digital’ practices and learn from past experiences and expertise, we need to contextualise and qualify what is new and what is not. In other words, we need an answer to the question: what were, and are, the continuities and ruptures in the use and uptake of new technologies in historical research, and in the debates that accompanied them?
Abstract: Gerben Zaagsma, Exploring the History of Digital History weiterlesen