From computers and history to

digital history: a retrospective

Donald Spaeth

University of Glasgow

IHR Seminar on Digital History

28 May 2013

Association for History and Computing,

Westfield, 1986-87

• ‘while there is much to celebrate about the last decade, the

fact remains that the profession is still divided between a

small minority of historians who use computers as tools for

analysing historical data and the vast majority who, while

they might use a PC for wordprocessing, remain

unconvinced of the case that it can become a

methodological asset.’ (Speck, 1994)

• or the web, online databases, archive catalogues, digital

cameras, etc. (2013)

body

norooms outdoors

value

object

item

room

Probate Inventories XML

Database

Visitation Act Book Database

Teaching History with Computers

DISH

Goals

• ‘students need to analyse databases actively and critically,

just as they have always examined traditional … sources’

• ‘ensuring that large generalised databases (preferably

reflecting the … entire content of a specific source) are

available to the largest possible constituency’

• ‘the utility of teaching IT and a particular subject

simultaneously’

• ‘academics … become guides accompanying their students

in an exploration of the past’

Carolyn Lougée,

The Would-Be Gentleman

Core Resources for Historians

Historical Problems

• Assess the extent to which the Irish were assimilated into

Britain.

• What do CEBs reveal about the gendered nature of work?

• Was a consumer society born in eighteenth-century

England?

• Did the Norman Conquest cause a tenurial revolution in

11th-century England?

• How important is the study of elections to an

understanding of politics in eighteenth century England?

The Future?

• MOOCs: massive online open courses

– Coursera, Udacity, edX

• Replacing lectures with podcasts

• Disseminating the best teaching

• More targetted teaching

Issues

• What problem?

• Intellectual property

• Assessment

– Multiple choice questions are almost as good as essays because

they spot-check participants’ deeper comprehension of the text.

‘Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now

closer to the MOOC experience’ (Gregory Nagy, Classics, Harvard

University)

The future of history and computing

• ‘historians want to stay historians, and do not want to

delve into the intricacies of information technology’

• ‘energy has to go to more fundamental methodological and

technical research’

• ‘denying these challenges and opportunities will …

segregate the study of history from the technical

capabilities currently being developed in the information

society and will turn the computer into an awkward tool

with limited use and usability for historians’

Boonstra, Breure and Doorn, Past, present and future of

historical information science (2004)