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Technology and the Historian

Here’s my reading of Adam Crymble, Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. Topics in the Digital Humanities 7. University of Illinois Press. 2021. 258pp.

In the fast-changing world of technology applied to historical research and outreaching, Adam Crymble’s book offers the uncommon and welcome case for a discussion that is destined to last. Crymble’s main concern is to historicises the relationship between the study of the past and the digital world. One cannot but agree with him that it is high-time for digital historians to overcome the debates on definitions that so often still polarises attention in the field, and to operate beyond a horizon of eternal present and promises of dizzying developments to come. Crymble – one of the authors of The Programming Historian – draws on his experience as a researcher and trainer whose career has straddled several continents in the Anglosphere – United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. The result is an uncommonly comparative if rather Anglocentric perspective – as the author himself admits.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the ‘myths of the origins’ of computing in historical research. It investigates the paths of a textual and a cliometric strand in the pioneering uses of computing applied to the study of the past, tracing them back to the seminal work of Robert Busa in linguistic studies, and to the application of quantitative methods by historians such as Frank Owsley on the US South, and of Conrad and Meyer in the field of economic history. The following chapters cover a broad spectrum of interactions between digital technologies and the study, interpretation, teaching, and communication of the past. These include the digitisation of sources and their distribution/circulation through digital media, the use of information technology in the history classroom, the sharing of practices and tools in the community of researchers, and the precipitous role that blogs have played in this community. The sixth and final chapter offers some concluding reflections.

Although the focus is not technology tout court but rather digital technology, Crymble outlines those experiences that provided important intellectual infrastructures preparing the advent of the digital age. One thinks, for instance, of innovations such as the encoding of the alphabet into binary signals patented by Samuel Morse in the 1840s, which ushered in the age of telecommunications. The reference to Morse at the beginning of chapter two, and the following summary of the evolution of text encoding standards provide a long-term background to the subsequent discussion of the digitisation of texts that has increasingly characterised the activities of several cultural institutions since the 1980s. This diachronic perspective and this consideration of what came before today’s known technologies are key ingredients of a history of digital history that abandons mythography in favour of historiography. Another commendable element in Crymble’s approach is the focus on the social and institutional contexts in which historians have been operating. Here, the discussion illuminates how visions of technology are informed by different national contexts. In the case of the digitisation of archives, to mention but one example, this is made clear by the different aims that have dominated large-scale initiatives in the United States and the United Kingdom – aimed at the classroom first, and then at the researcher’s desk.

In the third chapter, digital history in university teaching is surveyed through the analysis of more than 130 syllabi of digital history courses, charting changing trends between the beginning of the 2000s and the 2010s, with references to previous decades. The appendix provides the data on which this analysis is based. Here, a digital community of practice emerges as markedly autonomous from the disciplinary establishment, open to new trends and possibilities not (only) in the digital field. Crymble shows how, in education, digital innovation has had an impact beyond the use of technologies per se, such as in the rise of student-centred and flipped classroom approaches.

In the fourth chapter the author looks at how different scientific-institutional contexts have (or have not) been able to embrace and exploit the potential of new technologies, as well as the ability of digital practitioners to overcome (or not) a ‘methodological testing’ phase, and provide substantial contributions in terms of research results. This critical perspective underlies the reconstruction of the ‘invisible college’, the creation and sharing of informal resources for training in computer science from the 1970s to the present, against the backdrop of a generalised and often enduring lack of support from academic institutions.

The case study of the scholarly blog explored in chapter five represents a particular form of this relationship between digital practitioners and their disciplinary-institutional context. Insightfully, the blog is understood through its social role, as a vehicle in the construction of a community of practice. The rise of the blog can be read as a litmus test of the lack of adequate space for the discussion of theoretical-methodological issues related to digital technology in pre-existing venues of publication and debate. One might question, however, the author’s identification of a decline in influence of the scholarly blog in the second decade of the new millennium. The chapter does not seem to present systematic evidence of this, and there may have been, rather than a general decline, a change in the dominant functions.

Chapters one to five provide illuminating examples of how digital technology has stimulated new approaches to primary sources and new research questions, as well as how, in turn, the consideration of new sources and questions has engendered the evolution of digital technologies and their use in specific directions. The sixth, concluding chapter emphasises the need to understand digital technologies in the manifold impact they have had in the field of historical research, that itself consists of many different activities. Crymble invites his readers to abandon the idea of grouping under the label of ‘digital history’ a more or less coherent set of practices, and to rather reflect on what ‘doing history in the digital age’ means (p. 14). This reorientation might also explain the absence of ‘digital history’ in the final glossary. The glossary is meant to encourage a more judicious use of digital terms and concepts in the scholarly field, no longer as vague special effects, or ‘magic tricks’ (p. 166), but as a toolbox to make research projects more realistic and specific. The final considerations on international collaborations contain a sensitive reminder of how regional differences in the access to digital technologies also entail power dynamics and globally visible divides.

In conclusion, Crymble’s work is an essential reading for all those historians working with digital tools today (in other words, all historians), as well as a recommended reading for all those administrators and policy makers who find themselves in the position of having to manage, evaluate, and facilitate the work of historians in the digital age.

Science Fiction, Utopia, and Digital Humanities

Virtual archives, ideal libraries, new heuristics of the network

This article was first featured in Italian on the website of Apice (Archivi della Parola, dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, functional centre of the University of Milan), March 9, 2021. The author would like to thank Lodovica Braida for permission to translate and reproduce it here.

Interested in the relationship between humanity and techno-science, the speculative imagination thrives in the digital world. Indeed, science fiction has functioned as a hypothetical laboratory for experiments that have profoundly shaped the intersections between digital and humanistic studies. Starting at least with H.G. Wells’ World Encyclopaedia, with its neural structure – a prefiguration of our relational electronic databases -, concepts such as immersive virtual reality or artificial intelligence, and key reflections on the relations between corporeal physicality and digital dematerialisation have taken shape in the novels of authors such as Philip K. Dick, Anne McCaffrey, and William Gibson.

We therefore invite our readers to a brief survey of science fiction in the digital world, starting with this question: does speculative and utopian imagery constitute a particularly fruitful field of research for the humanities in the digital world? The answer – we are going to demonstrate with a few examples – can certainly be positive, at least in some important aspects of that multifaceted field undergoing tumultuous developments which goes by the name of digital humanities.

From the point of view of the accumulation and retrieval of textual information and bibliographic metadata, initiatives such as The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (started in 1995 and constantly being updated) show an impressive quantitative scope, and exploit the potential of crowd sourcing and cooperative construction procedures to support an open access model in favour of the end user. Cataloguing and encyclopaedic initiatives in the English-speaking world reflect an increasing global circulation of culture and translation trends that are bringing texts from non-European and non-Atlantic areas, such as China and Japan, to the international market. Exemplary of this is the space devoted to non-English speaking authors and works in the 18,000 entries of the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. Conceived by Peter Nicholls at the end of the 1970s, the SF Encyclopaedia came to the web in 2005, after several editions on paper and on CD-ROM – media that today would no longer be able to contain its extension. With its numerous international contributors and its team of editors-in-chief, it represents a mediation between open collaboration and authoritative authorship that is in many ways an alternative to the model typified by Wikipedia. The French-speaking world has also moved in this direction with the encyclopaedic portal Noosfere, which has been developed since 1999.

The web also makes multilingual resources or those that straddle linguistic-geographical borders accessible. Today, the European enthusiast can consult the young 中文科幻数据库 (CSFDB, Chinese Science Fiction Database) with the same browser with which she accesses the retrospective SF, Fantasy and Horror Catalogue founded by Ernesto Vegetti in 1958, which passed from computers and floppy disks to the Internet, and was closed in 2009 after having surveyed the fantastic in the history of books in Italy since 1602.

These are initiatives that have virtual communities behind them (not public and/or academic institutions) and therefore make the most of the possibility – made available by the Internet, and more specifically by the web – of structuring and operating groups of individuals who would otherwise be distant from each other, and of building ideal library catalogues that do not refer to physically existing collections.

In the academic field, may be mentioned the impressive utopian bibliography from 1516 to the present, compiled by Lyman Tower Sargent and hosted on the servers of the Penn State University Libraries, and the cornucopia of critical materials, bibliographical references, concordances, and electronic editions dedicated to the father of European utopia, The Essential Works of Thomas More, the result of collaboration between various scholars.

As for catalographic resources offering a web-based access point to real collections, one could list, alongside Apice’s catalogue, those of collections such as the Arthur O. Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy (University of California), the Science Fiction Hub and Special collection (University of Liverpool), the Utopian Studies Collection (University of Missouri-St. Louis), or the Arthur O. Lewis Society for Utopian Studies papers (Pennsylvania State University). These are just a few representative examples of a much more articulated galaxy, surveyed by the SF Archival Collections Wiki maintained by librarians of various institutions, and literally mapped in SF Archival collection, administered in Googlemaps by The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction.

The Internet in 2003. Visualisation by OPTE Project – https://www.opte.org/the-internet, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Graph engine LGL. Graph colours: red – Asia Pacific, green – Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa, blue – North America, yellow – Latin American and Caribbean, light blue – RFC1918 IP Addresses, white – Unknown.

Much could be said about how the world of fantastic speculation has embraced the potential of digital content distribution – with scientific and amateur journals, directories, and resource portals – and communication – from yesterday’s BBSs to today’s newsletters, forums, and websites. It is perhaps more interesting, however, to offer some remarks on those areas with a specific heuristic potential. If we answered positively to the question “has science fiction contributed to shaping the digital humanities?” we can ask ourselves, on the other hand, if and how the tools that are now being developed in the field of digital humanities contribute to a better understanding of speculative fiction.

In this context too, key texts of the European tradition such as More’s Utopia continue to attract the attention and creativity of scholars. The Open Utopia project by Stephen Duncombe (New York University), for example, proposes a hypertextual and multi-codical edition as a starting point for new readings and actualisations of the text, and connects the main site to a collective writing project on a wiki platform.

Marking up texts and organising textual corpora open up new possibilities of constructing analyses and visualisations. Moving from books to texts, to data, to data analysis, the science fiction researcher sees the promising territories of geo-referencing, spatialised narration and network analysis ahead. Between Moretti’s distant reading and new semantic and formal-structural investigations, a multitude of possible quantitative and qualitative investigations are been made available.

Thus, we begin to circumscribe and process sets of sources in order to capture the evolution of interests and tastes, from the perspective of cultural history and sociology (the text-mining of science fiction corpora in current researches such as that of Alex Wermer-Colan‘s) or literary history (the analyses and visualisations of a Gibsonian corpus carried out by Stefania Forlini, Uta Hinrichs, Bridget Moynihan, and John Brosz) and stylistics (the computational stylometry applied to C. S. Lewis by Michael P. Oakes), or building catalographic and popular applications.

In conclusion, utopian and science-fictional speculation is confirming, in the digital world, its ability to straddle different methodological traditions, and to rediscover and make fruitful a common epistemological background that is often little visible in our contemporary system of knowledge.

Giulia Iannuzzi

University of Florence – University of Trieste

A Directory of Directories

Lists and getaways of digitalised resources, with an eye on Early Modern History and green open access

Lists of lists and catalogues of catalogues, to help researchers navigate libraries and sources on the screen, especially focused on Early Modern History

> ongoing updates <

Grammars of Globalisation

Podcasts and webinars to keep in contact with what’s going on in the scholarly community

Here’s a selection of recent and ongoing initiatives and virtual spaces to keep in (social-distanced) contact with current researches and what’s going on in the scholarly community.

PiMo-Globhis, Visual grammars of globalization, virtual seminar: coordinated by Giovanni Tarantino, this seminar was held the 6th of May (I will post an update should a recording be made available). This seminar showcased a series of fascinating early-modern case studies as regards visual and material cultures and globalization processes, tackled through the theoretical lens of Gerd Baumann ‘grammars of identity/alterity’.

Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes … (London: Printed by William Stansby …, 1625), vol. 1, title page, detail. Copy at Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library-Yale University, Digital Collections, non known restriction for scholarly use.

Continue reading “Grammars of Globalisation”

Digital History

A directory of selected digital history projects, especially focused on early modern history, with special sections devoted to toolkits for digital historians and the Enlightenment

Image credit: Thomas Tuttell, Mathematical Playing Cards, 4 of hearts, ‘Sea Quadrant’, engraving, pasteboard, 1700, detail. © The Trustees of the British Museum, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

A directory of selected digital history projects, especially focused on early modern history, with special sections devoted to toolkits for digital historians and the Enlightenment.

> Ongoing updates <

Continue reading “Digital History”