The Common Landscape of Digital History: Universal Methods, Global Borderlands, Longue-Durée History, and Critical Thinking about Approaches and Institutions

The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of history as practised by scholars of different methodological and political orientations and subjects of study is really more of a patchwork of different fields and sub-fields. While not every kind of digital history applies to each sub-field, some forms of digital technique has been put to use in practically every domain that historians study. Because of the relative novelty of historians’ exchanges about digital methods, it is important that those essays are pedagogical in approach and critical as to method. This conclusion hazards that the work ahead for digital historians includes theorizing the bridge between close and distant readings, theorising the difference between AI and statistical measures, transparent documentation of the choice of algorithm, text and result in the practice of critical search, and engagement with new standards of scholarship from the institutions of historical and cultural knowledge-making.