1  What is Digital History?

There is endless possibility for discussing what the right answer to the question of what the term Digital History can encompass is. Since it is a part of the Digital Humanities, the current pragmatic definition by Blaney et. al (2021) can be useful:

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.1

“Digital tools” can mean a whole lot of different things, and you will hardly be able to find anyone who completely abstains from using any of these in their studies, in research or in teaching. We are all as historians living in a digital age and as such need to develop new competencies. We use word processing programmes as a matter of course for our seminar papers or essays, research via search engines and online catalogues or lexica are part of the daily business of historians. But in addition to that we can decide to use methods and techniques for a research project that go beyond the tradition tools of the historians – the analysis and interpretation of sources through close reading – and let ourselves be helped by the computer. Whether we do this with the help of existing software or write our own programmes, understanding ourselves not only as historians of a digital age but also as digital historians may for some be a matter of principle; an inclusionary attitude towards this question however seems to me to be only beneficiary.2

For a first idea of how one can answer historiographical questions with the help of digital methods and how diverse digitally assisted research projects can look like, take a look at the article “State of the Field: Digital History”.3
A growing list of examples from different epochs and thematic fields can be found in chapter two under Projects and Resources.

This guide is about an active, critical and reflected use of digital methods in teaching and research, with a focus on the uses for historians. Further reading on the question of what Digital History is as a whole can be found under Literature, Tools, Tutorials

  1. Blaney, Jonathan; Winters, Jane; Milligan, Sarah et al.: Doing digital history: A beginner’s guide to working with text as data, Manchester 2021 (IHR research guides), S. 6.↩︎

  2. Quite opposed to a frequently cited opinion of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s (*1929) the historian of tomorrow shall either be a programmer or not be at all: “l’historien de demain sera un programmeur ou il ne sera pas.” Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel: La fin des érudits, in: Le Nouvel Observateur, 08/1968.↩︎

  3. Romein, C. Annemieke; Kemman, Max; Birkholz, Julie M. et al.: State of the Field: Digital History, in: History 105 (365), 04/2020, pp. 291–312. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12969>, accessed: 09/15/2022.↩︎