Sunday, January 5, 2020: 9:10 AM
Clinton Room (New York Hilton)
Lara E. Putnam, University of Pittsburgh
Within the discipline of History, the digitization of textual sources coupled with web-based search has been enormously impactful—in ways historians who do not think of themselves as doing “digital history” have yet to size up fully. Given historians’ traditional reliance on place-specific expertise to guide discovery, the impact of digitization and with it the possibility of disintermediated granular search has been profound. Not only is research at a distance increasingly easy, but tracing things (people, ideas, commodities, publications) across multiple unpredictable locales has gone from extraordinary to routine. Historians have not yet theorized how to handle overabundance. They also have been, as a group, far more reluctant than some subfields like digital literary studies to adopt the kind of algorithmic tools that would parse out patterns within the corpora they are consulting.
Meanwhile, the generation of historians most comfortable with the integration of quantitative analysis within their research practice—those shaped by demographic and economic history methods collectively borrowed during the long rise of social history—is now steadily reaching retirement. At a time when many social sciences are moving in the direction of routine reliance on sophisticated modeling and data analytics, within many history departments even basic descriptive statistics are increasingly disappearing from the expected core training regime. Is there an opportunity cost to this unspoken but consistent discipline-wide choice? How does the suite of analytic tools historians carry (and the routinized gaps within our tool kit) shape our very perception of what the digital environment around us contains?
