Volume 61
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
The Lifetimes Research Collective, "Fossilization, or the Matter of Historical Futures," History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” project, the Lifetimes Research Collective adds to the geological turn currently underway in historiography by presenting a theory of fossils and fossilizations as a way of rethinking the concept of “historical futures.” We proceed by addressing two pivotal speech acts in Western historiography, in the broad sense: the “fossil question,” which was first raised in the middle of the seventeenth century, about how a solid can end up inside another solid and the nineteenth-century Marxist slogan for the modern world, “all that is solid melts into air.” Transported into the early twenty-first century and faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene, both take on new meanings and perform new tasks. In this article, we experiment with different ways of thinking and writing fossils into more general questions of historiography and historical theory by investigating how they affect conceptualizations of historical time. Furthermore, we demonstrate how fossilizations indicate possible trajectories for new materialist speculations, distributing agency to various matters, physical and virtual, in the Earth's crust as well as in museums and video games. Finally, we ask how a theory of fossilization can be seen to decenter the human subject by exploring the processes of decomposition and solidification taking place in the human body. In this way, the arrangements of timescales and lifescales that have given rise to disciplines like history, geology, and biology are destabilized in favor of open-ended historical knowledge ventures that transgress temporal and epistemological borders.
ARTICLES
Lucian Hölscher, “Virtual Historiography: Opening History toward the Future," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2022).
This article deals with the conceptual tools of a virtual historiography. This is what I call a historiography that goes beyond factual events to consider the possible alternative interpretations of the course of history without entering the field of counterfactual history. In contrast to counterfactual history, which asks what else could have happened, virtual historiography asks how the past would be seen if it had led to another future. For such a historiographical project, the article offers a set of conceptual tools that allow possible alternative courses of events in the past and present to be brought to the attention of contemporary historians: the concept of time figures for presenting a typology of the temporal directions of historical change (part 1); the concept of the future as a generator of time figures (part 2); the concepts of past futures for developments alternative to the factual course of history and of future pasts for visions of the present state of affairs seen from a future point of view (part 3). In part 4, I outline the significance of these concepts for a virtual historiography, and in part 5, I draw conclusions for the political use and the scale of time implicit in such a design of history.
Joshua Rayman, “Nietzsche’s Early and Late Conceptions of Time and Eternal Recurrence,” History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
Friedrich Nietzsche’s late notions of time and eternal recurrence are semiotically concentrated concepts, tacitly freighted by their history. What we think they mean on their face is other than their history testifies. Examination of Nietzsche’s early writings reveals multiple branching possibilities within his mature conceptions of time and eternal recurrence. His key early texts on time, space, and history—the apparently anomalous, five-page early-1873 fragment known as the Zeitatomenlehre (or “Time-Atom Theory”), On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks—described concepts ranging from time atom theory and eternal recurrence to monumental, critical, and antiquarian history, and the unhistorical, historical, and superhistorical. By determining which of these concepts he privileged in his early work, we can better judge whether the privileged time moment in Thus Spoke Zarathustra refers to a pure fiction, a discrete set of experiential, yet unhistorical time atoms, a continuous temporal spectrum, or a single superhistorical moment encompassing all time. Similarly, examination of Nietzsche’s early treatments of eternal recurrence in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks can help us determine his favored sense of eternal recurrence in the 1880s. This is not to reduce the late to the early work but rather to show just how he came to accept time and eternal recurrence as a plurality of overlapping, connected, recurrent, intratemporal phenomenological moments.
Daniel J. Schultz, “Revolutionary Spectatorship and Subalternity: Foucault in Iran,” History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
In this article, I offer a novel reading of Michel Foucault’s Iranian writings and probe their unexplored linkages with longstanding historiographical debates. I argue that these writings run headlong into the conceptual aporias of political modernity by contesting the assumed parallelism between consciousness and history and between subjects of history and history as Subject. I take up this problem through the double frame of revolutionary spectatorship and subalternity. In the first instance, I analyze Kant’s contradictory reflections on the French Revolution and Marx and Engel’s response to the (failed) revolutions of 1848 to show how uprisings are made to conform to a theory of the subject. In the second instance, in conversation with subaltern studies (Guha, Chakrabarty, and Spivak), I focus on the problem of representing the revolutionary subject or insurgent consciousness. Foucault’s Iranian writings problematize the particular way the revolutionary subject (the person who rises up [se lève], in Foucault’s vocabulary) is represented, or historiographically phrased. I argue that the confounding factor in this phrasing, the hard object that resists integration, is religion. I build a set of relays between genres of writing—philosophical journalism, philosophy of history, and subaltern historiography—that are subtended by this problem of incommensurability in order to illustrate the double bind of phrasing a religious subject in revolt. Across these heterogeneous conceptual grammars of historical analysis, I track “religion” and the “colonial” as différends in relation to what counts as a subject of history or history as Subject, and I show how religious and colonial phrasings (of history and subjectivity) find themselves in a position that has lost the capacity to claim a position.
Ljiljana Radenovic and Il Akkad, “History of Emotional Stuffering: From Emotions to Needs in the History of Emotions,” History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
Questions about the nature of emotions and the role of emotional expressions have been addressed frequently in the study of the history of emotions. However, the extent to which emotional suffering is present in the cultures and societies of the past is seldom queried. Our first goal is to identify criteria that historians of emotions can use to evaluate the emotional suffering of the people they study. We locate these criteria not in the theory of emotions, whether Norbert Elias's psychoanalytic theory or William M. Reddy's theory of emotives, but in the theory of basic, universal human needs proposed by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Although we agree with most contemporary historians of emotions that emotions themselves can be understood only within the context of a particular culture, we propose that additional inquiry into basic needs and their satisfaction could help historians of emotions cast more light on the inner lives of the members of the societies they investigate. Our second goal is to apply these insights to the case of acedia, a peculiar psychological state experienced by the Desert Fathers. We examine what acedia was for the Desert Fathers by analyzing Evagrius's writings. Our goal here is to capture what historians of emotions regularly do; that is, we aim to reconstruct how monks of the fourth century felt, expressed, and thought about emotions from within their own monastic culture. In addition, we analyze acedia from the perspective of the theory of needs. In this way, we hope to show how the theory of needs can help historians in their endeavors to understand the past.
INTERVIEW
Gregory Jones-Katz, “Theorizing and Practicing History as the Metabolization of the World: A Conversation with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,” History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
In this exchange, Gregory Jones-Katz and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht discuss Gumbrecht’s oeuvre, his book on Denis Diderot, and what this all might offer historians as they grapple with a transforming professional and intellectual landscape in the not-so-early twenty-first century. Of broad significance to the field of historical theory and practice are Gumbrecht’s explorations into the “presence”-based epistemologies embedded in often-canonical cultural protagonists’ lives and works. In his new book on Diderot, for example, Gumbrecht creates and employs a concept of our metabolic relationship to the environment to understand Diderot’s “implicit epistemology” as a way of thinking that was peripheral to Enlightenment and its “historical worldview.” Gumbrecht’s concept of metabolism describes certain intellectual operations that were emblematic for Diderot (and his times) and can also prove useful for historians (and humanists) in different contemporary contexts.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Martin Jay on The Benjamin Files by Fredric Jameson, History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
Verónica Tozzi Thompson on The Concept of History by Dmitri Nikulin, History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft on Crimes against History by Antoon De Baets, History and Theory 61, no. 1 (2022).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Jérôme Baschet, ”Reopening the Future: Emerging Worlds and Novel Historical Futures,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
Unlike those studies that conclude with a future collapsing under presentism, this article takes a fresh look at the issue of futures. To that end, the first part of the article offers a review of presentism, which amounts not to the erasure of any given future but to the proliferation of possible futures in the age of the Anthropocene. The second part sets out to identify novel futures that, while they may differ from those of presentism, do not seek to revive the future proposed by the defunct modern regime of historicity. By tracking the experience of “real utopias” bent on birthing other worlds, we can begin to map their preconditions. At the intersection of several extant regimes of historicity, the autonomous Zapatista zone that has, since 1994, arisen in southern Mexico has proven uniquely inventive; it may serve as a remarkable observatory for the appearance of unprecedented futures.
Dolly Jørgensen, “Extinction and the End of Futures,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
Extinction, in biological terms, is the end of an evolutionary line, a potential future cutoff. It involves a transition between the historical past in which a species was biologically alive and a future in which it isn't, a transition from extant to extinct. In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” series, I examine two aspects of extinction histories: transition and anticipation. First, I argue that scholars need to understand extinction as a process with a prolonged and even possibly reversible transition between extant and extinct rather than a definitive end point. Second, I analyze conservation as a practice of anticipatory extinction that tries to create futures for extant species. Extinction, as a nonlinear process, demands that we consider the coterminous past, present, and future. The end of futures for a species requires rethinking how we conceptualize historical (future) endings under times of rapid environmental change.
ARTICLES
David Ponton III, “An Afropessimist Account of History,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
This article addresses four questions: What is Afropessimism? What is history? What can history (not) do in service of black people given the insights of Afropessimism? If history fails to service black people, what should be done with history? It argues that an unavoidable conclusion of Afropessimism is that history, a disciplinary mode of knowledge production, is tethered to the historical construct of the Human and thus is exploitative of the Slave/the Black, which is the negative image of the Human. This article elaborates on the implications of this indictment of history, suggesting that invention of different ways of being becomes at least possible to imagine—to think about—when history is brought into relief, not as the form by which historians account for the past but rather as the evidence of who historians are and what they value in the world as it exists.
Lisa Regazzoni, “Unintentional Monuments, or the Materializing of an Open Past,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
This article examines the emergence of a new epistemic value that was attributed to remnants of the past during the broad debate on historical evidence in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the unintentionality of the testimony. Beginning in the early modern period, growing awareness of the partiality of historical literacy narratives regarded as intentional testimonies as well as growing interest in nonwritten pasts have led to the consideration of other kinds of relics, which have been seen as unwitting and indirect carriers of information about the past. Material and iconographic remains, languages and oral traditions, costumes, and superstitious practices gained currency as “neutral” and “authentic” testimonies of times past. This process is accessed by analyzing the historical evidence par excellence in eighteenth-century France: the monument as material and immaterial remains. Over the course of this period, evidence underwent impressive semantic enhancement and became a polysemic epistemological object. At the time, the term “monument” referred to an intentional mark designed for and entrusted to the future and to unwitting or involuntary evidence of the past, evidence that was later invested with historical value not originally intended by its maker. Although the nineteenth century saw the term “monument” lose its meaning as an unwitting trace of the past, what has survived is the epistemic value of an unintentionality of testimonies, albeit under other conceptual guises such as “remnants,” “witnesses in spite of themselves,” “traces,” and “clues.” What, then, is the usefulness of still imagining unintentionality today for the practice of research and for historical understanding?
Ulisses do Valle, “History’s Narrative Explanation under the Logic of Causal Imputation: An Essay in Honor of Max Weber’s Death Centenary,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
One hundred years have passed since Max Weber's death. This article explores an aspect of his work that, although fundamental, has received little attention in theoretical discussions about historiography: the relationship between explanation and narration. This article's analysis proceeds from two basic hypotheses: (1) some of the questions posed by narrativism to theory of history were already present in Weber's intellectual context; (2) in Weber's work, we can find a helpful, albeit nearly forgotten, answer to these questions insofar as his proposal situates the narrative explanation of history in the logical framework of causal imputation. Based on these hypotheses, this article's central objective is to examine how and to what extent a return to Weber can shed new light on the problem of historical explanation without disregarding its narrative nature. The article's first step, then, is to briefly review the fundamental questions posed by narrativism to the theory of history, with an emphasis on the structure of a historical narration; after that, it shows how and to what extent we can find a response to these questions in Weber's work. Ultimately, the article seeks to demonstrate the compatibility between the structure of a narrative, as evidenced by Arthur C. Danto, and the logical-causal explanation model proposed by Weber, which will serve as the basis for a clearer distinction between historical narratives and fictional ones.
Laurent Gauthier, “Putting Clio Back in Cliometrics,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
This article makes the argument for renewed cliometrics that could serve history. Over the past century, history and economics have grown relying on each other, but an imbalance has appeared, as the space between history and economics has been occupied by the latter. Consequently, historians have tended to shun these fields of inquiry. I begin my analysis with a discussion of the complex set of separate domains that lie between history and economics, and I determine certain salient features that define them—in particular, the search for nomothetic explanations. I examine the reception of economic method by historians and point out that it has suffered both from this nomothetic angle and from the implicit presumption that economics is only applicable to the economy. Stressing the distinction between understanding and explaining in the philosophy of history, I show that, for historians, explaining should remain in the realm of history. I then propose that economics be considered a methodological auxiliary for understanding, a form of new cliometrics, which does not attempt to offer explanations. I also discuss some examples of using microeconomics as a critical methodology in the study of ancient Greece.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Naveena Naqvi on Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism by Mana Kia, History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
Rochona Majumdar on Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South by Prathama Banerjee, History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
C. N. Biltoft on History in Financial Times by Amin Samman, History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
Amit Yahav on Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime by Aleida Assmann, translated by Sarah Clift, History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
Bennett Gilbert on History and Morality by Donald Bloxham, History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Sun-ha Hong, ”Predictions without Futures,” History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly how today's technofutures enact a hegemony of closure and sameness. In particular, the growing emphasis on prediction as AI's skeleton key to all social problems constitutes what religious studies calls cosmograms: universalizing models that govern how facts and values relate to each other, providing a common and normative point of reference. In a predictive paradigm, social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control—control that can never be fulfilled but that persists as an eternally deferred and recycled horizon. I show how this technofuture is maintained not so much by producing literally accurate predictions of future events but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time.
ARTICLES
Helge Jordheim, “Natural Histories for the Anthropocene: Koselleck’s Theories and the Possibility of a History of Lifetimes,” History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
In this article, I offer a rereading of Reinhart Koselleck that puts his work at the center of ongoing debates about how to write histories that can account for humanity's changed and changing relationship to our natural environment—or, in geological terms, to our planet. This involves engaging with the urgent realities of climate crisis and the geological agency of humans, which, in current discourse, are often designated by the concept of the Anthropocene. This article asks whether Koselleck's essays from the 1970s and after contain ideas, arguments, theories, and methods that may prove useful in collapsing “the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history,” to use Dipesh Chakrabarty's phrase. Indeed, the unlikeliness of providing a positive answer to this question is itself an important motivation for raising it. The other motivation is the supposition that the difficulties in bridging the gap between human and natural history fundamentally has to do with time and, more specifically, with the divergent temporal frameworks governing different historiographies, which are in part practiced in natural sciences such as geology, biology, and meteorology. The first part of this article discusses what one could call Koselleck's temporal anthropocentrism, which was handed down in German historicism and hermeneutics from the eighteenth century onward in the shape of what I call the Vitruvian Man of Time. In Koselleck's work, this superimposition of the human onto the multiple lifetimes of the planet is most clearly expressed in his claim about the “denaturalization” of history at the beginning of modernity. The second part of this article observes a shift in Koselleck's engagement with nature beginning in the 1980s; this shift is presented in terms of a “renaturalization.” The theoretical and methodological tool for this re-entanglement of the times of history and the times of nature is his theory of multiple times. Originally limited to the human, this theory rises to the task of including an increasing number of natural times that are no longer perceived as stable, static, and slow but as continuously accelerating due to “human use.” In conclusion, this article suggests that Koselleck's work offers the framework for a theory of “lifetimes” that can replace modernist history as platform for writing new natural histories for the future.
Hsin-Chih Chen, “Hayden White’s Enthusiasm for Hegel,” History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
This article traces the formation of Hayden White's chapter on Hegel in Metahistory by comparing it with his earlier essay titled “Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism.” It also analyzes White's review of George Armstrong Kelly's Idealism, Politics and History and White's well-known essay titled “The Burden of History.” This article argues that White's main concerns in his review essay and in Metahistory were (1) to respond to the existentialist challenge, posed especially by Camus, that history does not matter and (2) to use Hegel to articulate an answer regarding how historical consciousness and action can be combined. White created his version of Hegel early in “Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism” by absorbing (probably) Josiah Royce's interpretation of the Absolute and (more certainly) Erich Auerbach's idea of tragic realism. However, White's idea of tragedy, which focuses on the consequences of action, is not the same as Auerbach's idea, which concerns treating the psychological depth of characters seriously. In his review of Idealism, Politics and History and in Metahistory, White further injected the Kantian philosophy of history—as interpreted by Lucien Goldmann and Lewis White Beck—into Hegel's idea of tragedy and comedy. In doing so, White affirmed the philosophical activist's ability not only to recognize the tragic circumstance of the past and the present but also to hold on to the hope for a better, comic future.
Hubert Czyżewski, “Isaiah Berlin as a Historian,” History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
Intellectual history's methodology remains dominated by the Cambridge school and its approaches, which focus almost exclusively on the discursive context of political debates. However, a different practice of historical investigation may be found in the works of Isaiah Berlin. Although he is best known as a political theorist and an ethicist, Berlin pursued his philosophical agenda mostly through his works in the history of ideas that focus on Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers. Nonetheless, this methodology has never been presented in a systematic way—not by Berlin, and not in scholarship on his thought. This article argues that Berlin's understanding of past philosophers was different from that of the Cambridge school: he did not neglect the fundamental importance of historical context, but he did not understand the “context” primarily as comprised of interventions in political discourse; rather, he attempted to understand every thinker in his or her own right. Berlin's methodology as a historian can be summarized as an empathetic reconstruction of somebody else's mental world, and it was derived from the idea of fantasia, which was developed by the early modern Italian writer Giambattista Vico (who is a protagonist in many of Berlin's historical essays), and from the concept of “absolute presuppositions,” which was forged by R. G. Collingwood. Berlin's methodology allows for more in-depth comparisons between thinkers from different historical periods, as his approaches were founded on a philosophical belief in the existence of a transhistorical human nature that is confined by a horizon of shared human experiences.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Nicholas B. Dirks on How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, edited by Herman Paul, History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
Ian Hesketh on The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach by Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz, History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
Harry Jansen on Zeitgärten: Zeitfiguren in der Geschichte der Neuzeit by Lucian Hölscher, History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
Karen S. Feldman on A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound by Joshua Kates, History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022).
NUMBER 4
Digital History and Theory: Changing Narratives, Changing Methods, Changing Narrators
ARTICLES
Stefan Tanaka, ”The Old and New of Digital History,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
This article reflects on the expectations and changes that digital technologies have brought to history, activities that are increasingly codified as digital history. Because of the breadth of digital technologies and communicative media, the contours of a digital history are still unclear, so I frame my discussion with two potential narratives that begin from different ideas that emerged from World War II weapons research. One narrative begins with Roberto Busa and the application of a computer to find concordances in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The emphasis here is on the application of computer technologies to the practice of history. The second narrative begins with Vannevar Bush's essay “As We May Think” and focuses on digital technologies as a key element in an information system. This beginning invites a parallel between inscription technologies (especially the movable-type press) and knowledge systems. Both narratives imbibe the modern faith in technology to improve; the “new” is better, but the latter better involves humans and societies. Despite important differences between them, both narratives lead to an inquiry into the foundations of our modern knowledge system. In the case of history, the question is whether a knowledge system that was developed in the nineteenth century and designed to encompass and order the world into one system is still apposite in our digital world. I close by suggesting that one such presumption that needs to be reconsidered is the idea of the past as a prior and distant time-form. A shift from “the past” to “pasts” opens history to a broader field of previous happenings and a reconsideration of chronological time, of change, and to other modes of transmission, such as storytelling.
Shahzad Bashir, “Composing History for the Web: Digital Reformulation of Narrative, Evidence, and Context,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
I recently published A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, a digital book that presents a new way to understand Islam. This article describes the process and conceptual work that went into designing the book's interface. It emphasizes that hypertext enabled through digital means is not intrinsically more dynamic than print since work in both forms requires equally intensive hermeneutical effort. However, the digital realm provides a more expansive spectrum of tools to formulate concepts and to build on them. Digital presentation can be integrated into processes of theorizing, describing, and advocating that form the core of scholarship in the humanities. The article focuses on three areas—narrative, evidence, and context—that are central to modern historical work. My book's interface demonstrates that web capabilities are compositional tools whose deployment should be mulled over in a manner similar to how authors treat writing and editing. Moreover, we should take account of the quotidian fact that, in our environment, information and knowledge reach us extensively via computer-based mediation. Whether in books or in articles, academic work is assimilated through piecemeal delivery rather than bound volumes. Instead of romanticizing traditional forms whose import may be diminishing, historians and other humanities scholars can create new arguments by being attentive to the web's capabilities and to the current social conditions of possibility pertaining to the circulation of knowledge. Facility with digital composition can then feed back into all forms of humanistic thinking and writing.
Jesse W. Torgerson, “Historical Practice in the Era of Digital History,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
The current digital historical moment is an opportunity to formulate a new theory of historical practice. Our field’s long-standing passive reliance on the widespread explanation of historical practice as deriving information from “primary sources” is unhelpful, incoherent, misleading, and an active inhibition to new opportunities. Our reliance on an incoherent explanation means our students are not given a precise description of our historical practice but instead learn to imitate us by gradually adopting disciplinary norms conveyed through exemplary models and the critique of work performed. Furthermore, our reliance on a misleading explanation of method means we lack a common terminology with which we all can coherently explain to our peers what we actually do. We know this, and yet we have provided no alternative. The current moment offers an opportunity to provide a theory of the practice of history that encompasses contemporary, traditional, and even ancient historical methods: capturing sources, producing data, and creating facts. Wide acceptance and implementation of a sources-data-facts model of historical practice will accelerate student understanding, improve communication with other disciplines, erase the apparent distinction between (so-called) analog and digital history, and provide a framework for the publication of historical data as a valuable end in and of itself.
Laura K. Morreale, “History as Antidote: The Argument for Documentation in Digital History,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
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.
Silke Schwandt, “Opening the Black Box of Interpretation: Digital History Practices as Models of Knowledge,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Digital history is more than just the implementation of algorithmic and other data practices in the practice of history writing. It places our discipline under a microscope and enables us to focus in on what history writing is in the first place: writing about the past under specific social and societal conditions. This article argues for a closer look at the traditions of history writing in order to understand its principles and to determine what the digital condition contributes to historiography. Does the work of historians actually change in principle, or does digital history instead reflect the digital condition under which we operate? The article begins with a reflection on the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Michel de Certeau to discuss how the society in which the historian writes influences the practices of interpretation. The article then presents what can be understood as the digital condition of our present societies and shows how algorithms function as “black boxes” that influence our social interactions, communication, and understanding of the world. The article's third part brings together the earlier discussions of practices of history writing and the digital condition in order to examine the role of modeling for knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities. The closing argument then focuses on the use of visualizations in digital history as an example of the operational use of models of knowledge in opening the “black box” of interpretation.
Stephen Robertson, “The Properties of Digital History,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
This article offers a definition of digital history that focuses on the core affordances of the personal computer and the process by which those properties come to be exploited. I begin by outlining the two properties of computers that I argue define digital history: they process data and (as Janet H. Murray noted) provide an immersive and interactive medium. I then examine how digital historians in the United States have employed those affordances. That process has proceeded unevenly, with computers having been used as a medium before they were employed to process data, and has produced additive forms—digital archives, digital public history, data analysis published in print—that rely on existing formats rather than on the affordances of computers. While such forms are a necessary step toward a more fully realized digital history, their prevalence suggests that it will take some time for that process to play out. The final section looks to recently published and forthcoming long-form digital arguments for the direction of that development. Examples from Stanford University Press's Digital Projects series point to some of the ways that the data analysis and the immersive and interactive medium of the computer might be combined.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, “Toward the Recognition of Artificial History Makers,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Artificial intelligence is a historical discipline. This does not simply mean that its history can be written. It is historical on account of its recursive basis for action: its systems turn to prior beliefs—often through multiple steps or layers—to make recommendations for the present or predictions for the future. Using the two rooms approach of Alan Turing's imitation game, I highlight the potential for machine and human histories to be recognized via at least the idea of weak artificial intelligence. This recognition illuminates the mixed nature of the logic of history, combining deductions and endoxa. Finally, I note that illuminating and exploring this mixed logic of history signals a turn to historiographical metaphysics with Aristotelian features and, thus, the recognition of histories by professional historians as only part of a historiographical world. This signals that the recognition of machine and human history makers does not simply turn on the acknowledgement of imitation.
Wulf Kansteiner, “Digital Doping for Historians: Can History, Memory, and Historical Theory Be Rendered Artificially Intelligent?” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Artificial intelligence is making history, literally. Machine learning tools are playing a key role in crafting images and stories about the past in popular culture. AI has probably also already invaded the history classroom. Large language models such as GPT-3 are able to generate compelling, non-plagiarized texts in response to simple natural language inputs, thus providing students with an opportunity to produce high-quality written assignments with minimum effort. In a similar vein, tools like GPT-3 are likely to revolutionize historical studies, enabling historians and other professionals who deal in texts to rely on AI-generated intermediate work products, such as accurate translations, summaries, and chronologies. But present-day large language models fail at key tasks that historians hold in high regard. They are structurally incapable of telling the truth and tracking pieces of information through layers of texts. What's more, they lack ethical self-reflexivity. Therefore, for the time being, the writing of academic history will require human agency. But for historical theorists, large language models might offer an opportunity to test basic hypotheses about the nature of historical writing. Historical theorists can, for instance, have customized large language models write a series of descriptive, narrative, and assertive histories about the same events, thereby enabling them to explore the precise relation between description, narration, and argumentation in historical writing. In short, with specifically designed large language models, historical theorists can run the kinds of large-scale writing experiments that they could never put into practice with real historians.
Tamika Glouftsis, “Implicated Gaming: Choice and Complicity in Ludic Holocaust Memory,” History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Holocaust memorial sites and institutions have begun to embrace new media and digital technologies as methods of communication, public engagement, and memorialization. Despite increasing numbers of interactive digital media projects focused on Holocaust education, there is a significant gulf between the topics addressed by digital Holocaust works and those conceptualized and studied at a higher level in scholarly Holocaust literature. Most notably, challenging questions regarding the categories of bystandership, complicity, and perpetration are largely ignored in favor of traditional victim-focused narratives. I suggest that, in their eagerness to adopt virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies, digital Holocaust memory projects have neglected the significant potential of nonimmersive video games to address questions regarding bystandership and complicity. By moving away from the perceptual immersion of VR and toward the ludic and simulative arguments of video games, digitally interactive Holocaust projects may be able to lessen the risks of over-immersion and retraumatization that are antithetical to critical historical thinking and understanding. This article examines the 2013 game Papers, Please as an example of how video games can present sophisticated arguments about human agency, bystandership, and complicity. By placing players in a historical problem space laden with impossible moral choices, Papers, Please demonstrates the systemic forces that structure human behavior under extreme, violent, and authoritarian conditions. I argue that Holocaust-based ludic digital media modeled after Papers, Please could explore bystandership and complicity in similarly nuanced and powerful ways, potentially touching on academic Holocaust concepts such as the “choiceless choices” of “the gray zone.” Addressing these topics in ludic historical media could help to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly understandings of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century.
REVIEW ESSAYS
N. Katherine Hayles on Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Esther Wright on Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Christian Wachter on Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, History and Theory 61, no. 4 (2022).
Cover image: excerpt of dinosaur fossil on rough stone formation by Marcus Lange (1 March 2020)
