This programma?c paper departs from the premise that new technologies, whether analog, digital, or both, have long been applied to the various steps that make up the historical research process. It argues that the ques?on of how to frame a history of digital history can thus not be reduced to the ques?on of when digital electronic compu?ng entered historical research, an oGen implicitly assumed star?ng point. Instead, a more per?nent ques?on to ask would be how new technologies of reproduc?on, data processing, and otherwise have always shaped historical research prac?ces and knowledge produc?on and how digital electronic compu?ng fits into that broader picture. To answer this ques?on, we need to break down the historical research process into its cons?tuent steps and their associated prac?ces (gathering, processing, analysis, and dissemina?on). In other words, we need to shiG the focus from technology to prac?ces and ask how, when, and where these were affected, by which technologies, and by which user genera?ons. While doing so, it is important to remember that the human-machine encounter in historical research has never been a straighLorward process of con?nuity and progress in which today’s field of digital history emerged as the inevitable endpoint of the machine’s encounter with historical research and historians. That teleological image belies a much more complex historical development that must be teased out if we are to understand what is new and what is not in our current era of digital history.
The main aim of the paper is to propose an overall framework for a history (or histories) of digital history. If an imagined ‘collec?ve’ memory about the history of digital history can be said to exist, it is a history that started in the 1960s in the US and Western Europe, involved mostly digital electronic compu?ng employed in support of quan?ta?ve approaches, and took place within na?onal silos. As I will argue, at least five dimensions need closer aVen?on if we are to move towards more comprehensive and integra?ve histories of digital history: a shiG in focus from technologies to prac9ces, an expansion of the temporal as well as geographical scope of the inquiry, much more aVen?on for the role of networks and transna?onal exchange and, finally, for its poli?cal dimensions. This approach also entails a proposal to dis?nguish several major phases in digital history’s (pre)history, which I see emerging from a combina?on of new technologies, their uptake by new user genera?ons of historians, and their effects on historical research prac?ces. I will finish the paper by sugges?ng an agenda for future research.
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