This talk was part of a special panel entitled "Histories of Digital History: An Integral Part of the History of the Humanities?". See the abstract below: This panel seeks to engage the manifold histories of digital history set within the broader context of how new technologies have shaped historical research practices and knowledge production since at least the late 19th century. It aims to frame this investigation as an integral part of the history of the humanities and historiography, as well as the history of knowledge more generally. The first paper by Gerben Zaagsma will provide a proposal for framing histories of digital history. It will argue that at least five dimensions need closer attention to enable more comprehensive and integrated histories of digital history: a shift in focus from technologies to practices, an expansion of the temporal as well as geographical scope of the inquiry, much more attention for the role of networks and transnational exchange and, finally, for its political dimensions. The next paper by Kajsa Weber seeks to analyse how historians have evaluated reproduced sources in reviews in the leading journal for historical scholarship in Swedish; Historisk tidskrift 1881-2024. It contributes to the history of digital history by examining the intertwined trajectories of the humanities and (media) technologies in the past and will reveal the ambiguous ways historians have been interacting with new technologies. Edgar Lejeune will subsequently focus on data edition practices on the basis of three case-studies in medieval history in France in the 1970s. In the late 1950s, historians glimpsed the possibilities the electronic computers offered to renew access to archival funds. They started ambitious projects that aimed at producing databanks, automatic indexes, digital libraries of texts, etc. How did they edit this massive material for the computer? And how did it affect (or not) the epistemology of history? Finally, Andrew Flinn and Julianne Nyhan will look at multimodal oral history as an analytical approach in historicising digital history. An expanding body of scholarship is calling for treatments of the digital turn in the Humanities to rebalance an earlier tendency to over-emphasise its ‘revolutionary’ character, ‘landmark’ achievements, and masculinist and anglocentric orientation to the detriment of a more nuanced historical grounding. Via a ‘multimodal analysis’ of the corpus of oral history interviews conducted as part of the Hidden Histories of Computing in the Humanities project, this paper will argue that oral history can grant new insight into how individual subjectivities and alternative technological imaginaries have shaped the human-machine encounter in the humanities, in heretofore under appreciated ways.
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