Is the Revolution a Click Away? Historical Perspectives on Digital History

Odds are very good that you are accessing this introduction to the Canadian Historical Review's latest Historical Perspectives feature on Digital History in a digital format. While a significant number of chr subscribers still receive a print version of this journal, the vast majority of our subscribers receive it electronically, and many more access our articles individually in online formats. You may have found this piece by conducting a search in a database, and your search may have been facilitated by the embedded metadata that the chr's production team have created for it, or by software programs and algorithms that allow full-text searching and sorting of results. Perhaps a friend emailed you a copy. Or you clicked through on a link from Twitter or the University of Toronto Press Journals' blog. The way we discover and access published research has undergone a sea change in recent decades, the result of the rise of new computing technologies.

This represents the tip of the iceberg in the ways that historical research has "gone digital" over the past several decades. As academic and public history positions requiring digital history and digital humanities expertise have started to proliferate, and new courses in these fields appear in post-secondary institutions, the editorial board of the chr figured the time was ripe–if not overdue–to reflect on how digital history has been transforming the practice, teaching, and understanding of Canadian history. The authors in this Historical Perspectives section were invited to reflect on the historical development, present practices, and future directions and considerations for the field of digital history in Canada.

The section begins with Chad Gaffield's reflections on the past several decades of Clio's relationship with computing in Canada. Exploring the ebbs and flows of digital history, he observes that there have been many predictions that a revolution in historical practice would result from the transformational potential of digital history. And yet, these predictions have often been only partly realized, had false starts, or failed to materialize. Why is this the case? As a central participant in and keen observer of these developments, Gaffield considers many of the obstacles– and prejudices–that slowed the development of digital humanities in the field of history, which nonetheless continued to expand in important ways, as historians have shown increased openness to new rhetorical and methodological approaches. Obstacles and challenges remain, but as he concludes, "past experiences suggest that historians must critically and constructively engage with digitally enabled scholarship as an urgent priority for the discipline and, indeed, for all efforts to gain better knowledge and understanding of the past."

Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood have both been deeply involved with one of the signature digital history initiatives in Canada of the past couple of decades–the digitization of Canada's historical censuses. Indeed, as their contribution, like that of Gaffield, observes, many of the early digital history initiatives were explicitly linked to the desire to harness the power of computing to add a substantive quantitative element to historical research: to count, analyze and make sense of "big data" in historical contexts. Their article reflects on the dynamic potential of large-scale quantitative projects like the census project to shed light on the past, while also considering the historiography of Canadian research and publishing using quantitative sources. Analyzing a corpus of scholarship published in the major Canadian history journals, and scholarship on Canadian history published in interdisciplinary journals, they uncover patterns in the use of quantitative data. After a noticeable slump in Canadian historical publishing based on quantitative sources for a couple of decades, the twenty-first century has seen a significant uptick in quantitative data-based scholarship, thanks in no small part to how digitization has facilitated access to these sources.

Digital history encompasses much more than large-scale projects requiring major, often costly, infrastructure. Ian Milligan argues in his contribution that "we are all digital now," pointing to the rise of digital photography–so widely used in archival research–as a dramatic transformation of the way historians conduct their research...