Digital history

Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the Digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, interactive maps, time-lines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. A researcher can interact with, and visualise, the output more easily than with conventional historiographical material. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, 3D Modeling, and big data analysis. Utilising these resources the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories.

Early digital history in the 1960s and 70s focused on quantitative analyses, primarily of demographic data - censuses, election returns, city directories, etc. These early computers could be programmed to conduct statistical analyses of these records, creating tallies, or seeking trends across records. This research into historical demography was rooted in the rise of social history as a field of historical interest. The historians involved in this work sought to quantify past societies, to come to new conclusions about communities and population. Computers proved capable tools for that type of work. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, but the outpouring of quantitive studies by established scholars continued. Since then, Quantitative history and Cliometrics have been used primarily by historically-minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded The Association for History and Computing. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s.

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