Digital History: Where Is It Headed?, Part 2: Digital History: New Research Questions/New Opportunities/New Pitfalls

Session Abstract

This panel examines the differences and respective limitations and promises of data-driven vs. text-driven digital research projects.  (But not to be confused with digital media, either the creation or analysis thereof.)  Our goal is not to provide show and tell, tempting as that is, but rather to explore what capacity the digital medium has to provide us with different answers to fundamental questions of long-standing interest to the profession than are yielded by traditional methodologies of evidence gathering and analysis.  We also seek to explore opportunities for new questions altogether given the capacity to amass large quantities of evidence for uniform analysis, or to overlay one kind of evidence on another.