History as Antidote

The Argument for Documentation in Digital History

Laura K. Morreale

History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022)
Theme Issue: Digital History and Theory: Changing Narratives, Changing Methods, Changing Narrators

The ephemeral nature of computer-enabled historical work is a well-documented concern within the field of history. The quick pace of technological change often renders digital scholarship obsolete, which in turn encourages historians to retreat to the stable and durable comfort of print, even as digital methodologies enrich our research and expand the audience for it. What has been missing so far in the conversation about digital history is a clear understanding of how it differs from traditional historical products, what can be gained from it, and how we might document the work undertaken using these machine-based methodologies. Because it is best understood as a process rather than as a product, digital history must have a history of its own to tether it to the scholarly community and to ensure that it endures past the active phase of any project. This article argues that digital historians should catalog their work using a normalized template following the Digital Documentation Process, a guide for producing documentation that is suitable for computer-based historical scholarship and tailored to its specific parameters. Self-documentation is beneficial to those who create digital history and those who consume it. It is urgent to establish a field-wide expectation that digital history will be consistently documented as a matter of course, lest we lose scholarship that has already been produced and forgo the enormous opportunities that computer-enabled methodologies offer to historians.

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