Doing digital history

A beginner's guide to working with text as data

Jonathan Blaney, Jane Winters, Sarah Milligan, Martin Steer, Simon Trafford

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526132680
• eBook ISBN: 9781526132697
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book is a practical introduction to digital history. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction to how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. Doing digital history covers the entire life-cycle of a digital project, from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as XML. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools.

1

THE CONTEXT OF DIGITAL HISTORY

INTRODUCTION

It is a difficult task, doomed in advance, to say in a few words what has really changed in our area of study, and especially how and why that change took place.¹

There are a number of strands we have to try to weave together in describing the context and development of digital history. We will start by discussing the place of digital history within the broader context of digital humanities, and then within the context of the development of technology in the post-war period. We will move on to discussing the effect of the digital on three areas of the historian’s craft: finding, writing and citing.

A sceptical view of the impact of digital history might suggest that it only really involves traditional historical methods speeded up. It would be possible, for example, for a team of researchers over many years to read the whole of Hansard and create an index of the appearance of a particular term or set of terms; now one researcher can do the same thing in a leisurely morning’s work. But, as we will see in Chapter 2, the digitisation of Hansard has led to much deeper change in historical work. Speed, moreover, changes things by itself. The digital has changed life fundamentally for historians and, as there are trade-offs with all change, these changes are not uniformly positive. We will look at the effects of technological developments, but this will not be simply a celebration of digital approaches. Digital offers extra tools for the historian’s toolbox, not replacements for the old ones.

A broader point, which we will touch on only here, is that the fundamental changes engendered by the digital have not just affected historians but indeed all of us. It has changed how plumbers, surgeons, schoolchildren, till operators and parents carry out their tasks and so has changed them as people.² Historians, then, are just one more group carried along by changes in society. Some commentators, like Nicholas Carr and Matthew Crawford, are concerned that the effect on society is overall a negative one, particularly in terms of the skills such as reading and reasoning which are central to historical research.³

Just as the analogue world has not gone away, and smartphones can be switched off when walking in the countryside, so the working world of the historian is not wholly digital and we hope and expect that it never will be. The catalogue terminal still very frequently leads us to books and to manuscripts; the web leads to new opportunities to meet other historians, to visit archives, libraries and museums. At its best, the digital world can be a finding aid to what we really value.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND DIGITAL HISTORY

Much has been written and debated around the definition of digital humanities.⁴ This book is a practical guide to doing digital history and so not the place to revisit those debates. But we do want to insist on one thing: doing digital humanities need not involve writing programs (also known as coding).⁵ We would be committed to this proposition even if this book, which contains no coding, was not an attempt to instantiate it. Digital humanities, in our view, is a question of approach: if you are actively and critically using digital tools to aid your work in researching, teaching or learning, you are probably doing digital humanities. We would encourage anyone to learn to program if they are interested in doing so, but we do not see it as a defining characteristic of work in digital humanities.⁶

The overlap between digital humanities and digital history is large. Many techniques are common to both and few historical resources are unexploited by researchers from other disciplines. For example, Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a commercial project which provides page scans of books published in England or English between 1472 and 1700.⁷ The books digitised by EEBO are of great interest to historians, but also to scholars of literature, theology, art history, linguistics, law and many other subjects.⁸ With twenty-five thousand transcriptions now available from the academic consortium EEBO-TCP, many researchers from different disciplines are able to use this corpus to do the aggregate work which is one feature of digital humanities. Digital resources many times smaller than EEBO are also of use to researchers across the humanities, and any bright line between digital history and digital humanities is of questionable value.

The Spanish historian Anaclet Pons divides the history of what we now call digital humanities into three eras:

1. The ‘heroic’ era of work by pioneers

2. Pre-web work when computers were becoming widespread and the field was known as ‘humanities computing’

3. The web-enabled digital humanities era, characterised by abundance⁹

Before we even get to the pioneers of the computing age, a literary example of work that would now be done by computing is T. C. Mendenhall’s ‘The characteristic curves of composition’ (1887). As described by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéphan Sinclair, Mendenhall produced graphs of word length frequencies for authors in an attempt to prove that Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare.¹⁰ This was not the first visualisation by any means – William Playfair, working in the eighteenth century, is credited by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as the inventor of ‘three fundamental forms of statistical graph – the time-series line graph, the bar chart, and the pie chart’¹¹ – but it is a striking echo of work done today. To prove the point, Rockwell and Sinclair have recreated Mendenhall’s work in a downloadable Jupyter notebook.¹²

However, the first of the early digital humanists proper was probably Josephine Miles. A scholar of English poetry, particularly of the seventeenth century, Miles pioneered computational approaches to literature. Most notably, she worked on a concordance (an alphabetical index to all the words used in a work, used as a finding aid) to the poetry of John Dryden using punched cards and early computers.¹³ Miles commented pithily on this process and its advantages:

Three problems were primary: the bulk of the work, the cost of publication, the difficulty of accurate checking by assistants unfamiliar with the material. The decision to use IBM machines as an aid in checking helped solve the other problems in turn.¹⁴

Better known, but slightly later, is the work of Roberto Busa. He used an IBM computer to make possible the indexing of the voluminous works of Thomas Aquinas. Appropriately, the output of this project, the Index Thomisticus, followed a sequence found with many long-lived digital humanities projects: it was published first as a multi-volume print edition, then as a CD-ROM, followed ultimately by a web version.¹⁵

The beginnings of digital history itself are strongly associated with two historical movements: the quantitatively focused and largely American cliometrics movement and the French Annales school. Cliometrics lends itself particularly to questions of economic history and population history, placing great value on statistical methods and approaches. The article ‘The economics of slavery in the antebellum South’ by Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, published in 1958, is a foundational document for cliometrics’ mathematical approach to historical questions. Here Conrad and Meyer argue that, absent the US Civil War, slavery would have continued in the South, because it was profitable. The novelty of the paper, however, lay in their methodology rather than their conclusion. The authors tested their ‘hypothesis’ by examining data including prices for slaves and cotton, output per slave, life expectancy and reproduction rates among slaves (the language of the article is studiedly neutral on the horrors that lay behind the figures). Interestingly, given that a theme of our chapter is the way that wider technological change influenced historical practice, a criticism Conrad and Meyer make of previous approaches to this question is that:

the debate over the value of the different constituent pieces of information reconstructs in embryo much of the historical development of American accounting practices.¹⁶

Annales historians, although they differ somewhat in approach and interests, have focused on the longue durée of economic and social history and so, as with advocates of cliometrics, naturally took an early interest in how computing could make this work less labour intensive. Perhaps the most enthusiastic of the group was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who was clear that computers are not simply labour-saving devices, but that they altered the direction of historical study: where previously ‘the massive extent of the documents seems to have paralysed researchers’, now (he was writing in 1970), ‘modern techniques … permit a genuine historiographical revolution’.¹⁷

An early example of the use of computing in British historical research was the work of Roderick Floud. While doing doctoral research in 1965, Floud obtained extensive historical records from an engineering firm and used a computer to analyse the vast quantity of material he had acquired. It is probably relevant that, as well as being an economic historian, Floud was a proponent of quantitative and econometric history: early historical work using computers often had to focus tightly on number crunching because computers were primarily designed for this function at that time. Floud recalls that, while there was hostility to cliometrics itself among some historians, this did not extend to the use of computers: ‘computing … was really seen as being a natural extension of other forms of historical scholarship’.¹⁸

This disti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 The context of digital history
• 2 Formulating your research questions
• 3 How a digital project begins
• 4 Working with text 1: unstructured text
• 5 Working with text 2: structured text
• 6 Caring for your digital history project
• 7 Visualising your data
• 8 What next for digital history?
• Test yourself answers
• Appendix 1: Getting the data
• Appendix 2: Some command line recipes
• Appendix 3: Regular expressions
• References
• Index