This is the first in a series of blog posts discussing concepts and issues from my History of Modern Science seminar. This section’s topic is on historiography and the ways in which digitization is changing how historical research is done.
In the modern era, secondary sources are widely available online through digital databases, and many primary sources are also becoming increasingly available even to historians not affiliated with a university. Some of our readings express concern about increasing over-reliance on digitized sources.
Lara Putnam’s article The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast deals with a variety of topics raised by the increasing use of digitized sources in the practice of historical research. Ian Milligan’s The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age provides a concrete example of a researcher in 2000 conducting in-situ research at an archive in contrast to a researcher in the current year who relies primarily on the more limited range of easily accessible digital resources in order to prioritize an idea of speed and efficiency in paper production.
Milligan points out that (for more recent history, at least) substantially less information is digitized than was available on microfilm, and suggests that increased speed of access might make researchers less likely to take care in reviewing their sources. (Frankly, I’m still not entirely convinced that the speed at which researchers can access archival materials actually means an overall major decrease in the quality of research— I understand the theory behind the concerns, and I certainly agree that the skillset necessary for research is very different now than it was twenty years ago, but I would like to see more solid evidence of issues than hypothetical descriptions.)
What I found particularly interesting about the context of both of these readings, however, is the assumption that one of the main forces pushing historians to use easily accessible online primary and secondary sources instead of traveling to archives or browsing university libraries is time pressure. As someone who is not really participating in academia yet (and does not intend to become a career academic), I had not thought too much about the potential pressure from outside forces to increase research and publication speed. Both readings seem to take it for granted that with the advent of digitization historians have also been put under more pressure than before to create content rapidly, while it seems to me that finances and health and safety would play a substantially larger role.
We briefly discussed in seminar whether it would be feasible to slow the pace of publication and thus reduce some of the issues brought up by Putnam and Milligan, eventually deciding no. I’d like to further suggest that even in a world where the expected pace of publication was much slower, the difference in information-seeking skillsets in researchers who grew up with the internet means that they wouldn’t gain a lot of benefit from having extra time and resources, since the way that one goes on deep research tangents online is completely different from the examples given in the papers of ‘analog’ research.
Perhaps a more reasonable solution to the issue, rather than letting researchers work on their own time and expecting that to cause a reversion to older research methods, is to put more effort into digitizing a wider range of material and to incentivize archive digitization of the smaller, less relevant things that one might only find on an in-person visit.
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