Blazing Trails Toward Digital History Scholarship

HISTORIANS HAVE experimented with computing technology for decades, using it as a tool in their scholarship to ask new questions and analyse new sources. For the most part, historians have used statistical software and adopted techniques from the social sciences. They have analysed voting returns, migration, social mobility, family patterns, and a wide array of structures in economy, society, and politics. They borrowed freely from the social sciences, adopting theories, jargon, and subfields. The reaction to their work and the use of computing technology in it was mixed, as conservative historians defended the “humanistic” approach and railed against “quanto-history” and “psycho-history”. Critics of quantitative approaches to history watched carefully for technological determinism and emphasized the roles of individuals and the limitations of structural patterns to explain adequately events, human change, and social life. But quantitative historians have achieved notable breakthrough interpretations in social, economic, and political history over the last 30 years. Throughout these years quantitative historians defended their scientific approach to historical problems, yet did not use the computer to create new forms of scholarly presentation. In the 1970s and 1980s historians, even those experimenting in narrative forms with poststructuralism, used computers only to analyse and measure patterns in data, not to create or present new forms of scholarship and narrative.