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.