Digital Humanities and Media History

Abstract

Digital humanities is an important challenge for more traditional humanities disciplines to take on, but advanced digital methods for analysis are not often used to answer concrete research questions in these disciplines. This article makes use of extensive digital collections of historical newspapers to discuss the promising, yet challenging relationship between digital humanities and historical research. The search for long-term patterns in digital historical research appropriately positions itself within previous approaches to historical research, but the digitization of sources presents many practical and theoretical questions and obstacles. For this reason, any digital source used in historical research should be critically reviewed beforehand. Digital newspaper research raises new issues and presents new possibilities to better answer traditional questions.

Audio on Paper: The Merits and Pitfalls of the Dutch Digital Media Archive for Studying Transnational Entanglements during the Second World War

“…Reflecting on digitized newspaper-research, Huub Wijfjes has argued that to come to answers to history-specific questions researchers need to combine computational quantitative methods (distant reading) with more traditional qualitative methods (close reading). 9 Working along these lines the researchers of the project MediaOorlog have experimented with distant reading to generate semantic patterns to identify certain moments in time to use for a close reading. In this working method they encountered certain restraints that limited the possibilities for distant reading, particularly of audio files.…”

European Research After the Archival Turn: A Response to Sonja de Leeuw’s Article ‘The Archive as Network’

“…8 For instance, professor Huub Wijfjes uses in Digital Humanities and Media History: A Challenge for Historical Newspaper Research "extensive digital collections of historical newspapers to discuss the promising, yet challenging relationship between digital humanities and historical research". 9 The sample for HJFRT shows archive based case studies such as "Uncovering Forgotten, Unseen and Contested Representations of 'Black Britain': Gloo Joo (1979) and Meadowlark (1982)", written by Sally Shaw, who used the Channel 4 archives. 10 The papers for the conference Television Histories in Development, which is the largest, most recent and most international sample here, shows an estimation of around 60% use of digitised television archives from all over the world (Figure 4).…”