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History and the Archive, there is an ongoing, large-scale digitization of material which has provided unprecedented access to an ever-increasing archive, but which also has generated a raft of ideological, institutional and political issues. In this context, historians are encouraged to entertain the idea of working with data, data-driven techniques and visualizations. History, there are new platforms for history-making. 5 These platforms may be collaborative through community involvement, they may embrace the publish-then-filter model of knowledge creation, they may utilize multimedia, they may only exist online with no equivalent print version, and they may not be Murray G. Phillips, Gary Osmond and Stephen Townsend, "A Bird's-eye View of the Past: Digital History, Distant Reading and Sport History". The International Journal of the History of Sport. Published online 28 October 2015. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2015.1090976 2 wedded to linear narratives. 6 In these forms, digital history challenges the very nature of traditional historical scholarship.In this article, we specifically address the first part of our tripartite conceptual tool, DigitalHistory and the Archive, discussing concepts such as computer analysis, databases and metadata. Some readers may turn off at this point, as history is considered a qualitative discipline of the humanities rather than any exercise in number crunching -that is the mantra of the sciences. Yes historians have used numbers; occasionally, and sparingly, particularly in specific historical moments epitomized by the Jockers argues, in the way we study the past. 22As much as digitization opens up, even demands, new research approaches, it raises a number of problematic issues for historical work. 23 Search interfaces or computer reading machines, the crucial link between digitized sources and historians, are designed by libraries, archives and companies.Historians rarely have input into their design, often creating less-than-ideal research tools and these often bespoke search interfaces require skills not traditionally found in the training of professional analyze eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels, OCR in historical newspapers is nowhere near as successful as the transition from hard copy to digital forms is affected by the print quality of the original.In recognition of this problem, many information institutions have crowd sourcing projects that manually correct errors in digital copies of newspapers. 24 It is essential to acknowledge that the success and applicability of digitization and computer reading machines differs between fields of inquiry and 'takes place in an economy of loss and gain'. 25If we accept that digitization of archival material and search interfaces offer unique advantages, In this article, distant reading of digitized newspapers is used to explore three case studies. The first case study details research into Muhammad Ali, the American boxer and icon of racial politics; the second is an analysis of the emergence of women's surfing on the beaches of...

Muhammad Ali’s name is one of the most significant yet understudied aspects of the great boxer’s extraordinary life. Throughout his career, journalists used Ali’s birth name (Cassius Clay) and his Islamic name (Muhammad Ali) to transmit their attitudes toward him. This study interrogates trends in newspaper usage of Ali’s two names during the 1960s and 1970s as a way to understand changing public attitudes toward him during this period. It does so via a distant reading of 37,911 digitized newspaper articles obtained from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. By quantitatively visualizing trends and patterns in the usage of the two names, this study reveals that American journalists did not embrace Ali’s chosen name until 1971. Acceptance of the name in the press was not gradual but was instead characterized by intense shifts at key points in Ali’s career. Finally, this paper addresses the value of digital history—specifically, distant reading—for sport history scholars.

Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this 'infinite archive': distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representations of these practices. This article investigates the utility of distant reading as a research tool via three newspaper case studies concerning Muhammad Ali, women's surfing in Australia, and homophobic language and Australian sport. The research reveals that the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of distant reading is dependent on numerous factors. While valuable in many instances, distant reading is rarely an end in itself and can be most powerful when paired with the traditional historical skills of close reading.