Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data

Abstract

Living with Machines is the largest digital humanities project ever funded in the UK. The project brought together a team of twenty-three researchers to leverage more than twenty-years' worth of digitisation projects in order to deepen our understanding of the impact of mechanisation on nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast to many previous digital humanities projects which have sought to create resources, the project was concerned to work with what was already there, which whilst straightforward in theory is complex in practice. This Element describes the efforts to do so. It outlines the challenges of establishing and managing a truly multidisciplinary digital humanities project in the complex landscape of cultural data in the UK and share what other projects seeking to undertake digital history projects can learn from the experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Digital History and Immaterial Infrastructure: A Bottom-Up Approach

“…A cornerstone of our engagement in DigitalHistory@Lund has been to form a platform guided by generosity and openness [10]. The platform has welcomed all researchers at the HT faculties and invited them to take advantage of its resources and competencies.…”

“…Digital history is a flexible term referring to the nature and organisation of historical sources, the tools of analysis, and the means of presenting results. While new reproduction technologies have a long history of prompting historians to consider technology's implication for the discipline [6], [7], the past decade has seen digital history grow rapidly, sparking renewed discussions about the future of the historical discipline [8]- [10] as well as historiographical enquiries into the origins of computer-assisted historical analysis [11]- [13]. As a proof of the field's consolidation, the first issue of the Journal of Digital History (De Gruyter Press/CD2H Luxembourg) appeared in 2021.…”

Designing digitally-driven integrative interdisciplinarity: Professionalism between protocol and judgement

“…Nevertheless, there still remains a palpable lack of blueprints and considerations of 'embodied' expertise for developing interdisciplinary DH projects. As Ahnert et al [5] note in a recent study, "new projects and initiatives expend a lot of energy in their startup period trying to establish collaborative values and project management strategies, often reinventing the wheel in the process".…”

Historical Research in the Context of Dataism: Methodological Aspect

“…Сегодня в дискуссиях о принципах применения информационных технологий в исторических исследованиях можно встретить немало противоречий, связанных со сложностями взаимодействия подходов информатики, исторических и социальных наук, все еще встречаются противопоставления качественных и количественных подходов [Селунская и др., 2018], несмотря на широкое распространение «смешанных методов» (mixed methods), а также отмечаются различия задач информационных технологий как отрасли и научного сообщества [Milligan, 2022]. Данные становятся общим знаменателем таких дискуссий, потому что в современных исследованиях приходится опираться именно на них [Ahnert et al, 2023].…”