Conclusion
Digitized archives, digital archives, and web archives have greatly enhanced humanities scholarship in general, and historical research in particular. Careful work involving these resources requires that computational techniques be used with the understanding of how these digital sources came to be, how they were digitized, their properties, and the computational scaffolding encompassing them. As sources are always in need of interpretation, historians develop and implement techniques and tools to explore, interrogate, and promote an understanding of sources using their properties, mode of creation, usage, and management.
Library of Congress archive specialist Trevor Owens advises that historians be as careful, analytical, thorough, and rigorous in their handling of digital assets, sources, and archives as they have traditionally been in their handling of physical, material sources. These considerations are becoming more imperative as historical scholarship is increasingly dependent on digital sources. Consequently, the questions of source criticism are still applicable to digital sources. As digital technology is rapidly evolving, an urgent task for historians is to establish, disseminate, and share techniques for working with and addressing the challenges of the wide variety of digital sources. As Owens states, “[a]s information ecologies continually shift it is going to be critical for historians to show their work in making sense of the stratigraphy of digital sources” (Owens & Padilla, 2021). Although vital to historical research in general, and digital history in particular, understanding the purpose, nature, motivation, concerns, limitations, and basic methods of digitized materials, digital archives, web archives, digital curation, and digital forensics have a high degree of saliency for all researchers and practitioners engaged in digital humanities scholarship.