Building Historical Knowledge Byte by Byte: Infrastructures and Data Management in Modern Scholarship

This chapter describes how the new emerging digital environment challenges historians’ existing training and practice of source criticism. In an environment with increasing amounts of digitized data and digital methods there are new requirements for historians to develop new skills as well as new more extensive provenance data. Historians are faced with new challenges regarding new increasing demands for transparency and open scholarship that has comes with the growth of digital humanities in general and with digital history in particular. The old demands that historical research has to be well documented and reproducible has to be adapted to the promises and pitfalls of the new digital environment which especially means developing and adapting new standards and practices for what counts as good data management. The study discusses how the FAIR data principles can offer valuable guidance, but also how they cannot be implemented without supporting services that take into account different types of data and the data lifecycle.