Digital History
Although the digital humanities developed directly from text and textual analysis, digital history is based on a variety of sources. In addition to textual analysis, digital history employs geographic information systems (GIS) and adopts and adapts approaches from historical geography. It shares concerns with economics and the social sciences. Digital history also utilizes methods from prosopography (the study of social and family relationships and connections), biographical data, and genealogical research (Winters, 2018). It encompasses all types of data, e.g. Big Data and small data, as well as micro- and macro-analysis methods, analogous to close and distant reading in literary studies.
Web archives facilitate close reading through capturing personal websites and self-published material, such as weblogs, and therefore empowers individuals. Conversely, macro-analysis and distant reading is also made easier through web archives, leading to a return to “big history”. Using computational tools available on Web archives allow scholars to make sense of the vast deluge of available and ever-increasing volume of data by reducing complexity, thereby uncovering previously undetected patterns and relationships (Winters, 2018).
Although many historians will use web archives for their textual content and word searching capabilities, some will also engage the other rich multimedia content in these repositories. In this way, web archives encourage historians to cross disciplinary boundaries into such areas as media and communication studies, art history, linguistics, and technology studies, and consequently, to form collaborations with researchers in these fields. However, to obtain the greatest possible benefit from resources in Web archives, the historians need to have some statistical and other quantitative skills, as well as some knowledge of the technical structure of archives, their interfaces, and the processes used to create and maintain them. Although digital history has adapted many of the techniques from cognate subjects, such as archaeology and historical geography, it also needs to fully engage with developments in the two important areas of library, archive, and information studies, and digital preservation. In the words of University of London digital humanities scholar Jane Winters, “…they might, by combining big data approaches with humanistic understandings, at last begin to develop genuinely new research questions and generate new knowledge” (Winters, 2018).
