Digital Historical Practices

Ten years into the twenty-first century, the historical profession is coming to terms with the ways in which the internet is irrevocably changing what we do and how we do it.¹

With these remarks, Rachel Leow introduced the Journal of Women's History readership to a roundtable of historical bloggers. A decade later, we are still debating the implications of the "digital" for our profession. Rather than revisiting the various positions, I want to offer insights from my practice as a digital historian. I view digital history as a question-driven research process rather than the production of a particular end product. Becoming a digital historian, a mid-career shift, has not changed my core praxis. I rely, as I always have, on robust research questions anchored in archives. How I go about answering them is where the differences arise.

Over the past decade, I have experimented with many approaches to answering historical questions using digital history approaches. In response to a suffrage historian's query, I evaluated gendered rhetoric in the sixvolume History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922).² A digital history approach allowed me to highlight how men and women adopted different rhetorical strategies to fight for women's rights. For example, male authors continually engaged in a rhetoric of separate spheres, while female authors instead emphasized aspects of women's nature that justified expanding their rights.

In another case, my inquiry began with the quest for an original copy of a historical document, "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo" (1965), often credited with launching the second wave of feminism. I finally located one, via Google, when a finding aid for a recently processed collection went online. Software called Juxta pinpointed the changes between the published version that historians had relied on for decades, and the original, mailed to just thirty-two women. Juxta creates a side-by-side visualization that colors the text where differences occur between versions. That visualization appears in the essay to document changes made in the published version, which have led to an interpretation of "Sex and Caste" as an attack on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by white women who wanted more power for themselves or who sought to organize women separately.³ The original Memo's list of recipients, omitted from the published version, indicates that the authors sent the document to a small group of SNCC insiders. A closing section, also omitted from the published version, illuminates the authors' limited intent to promote discussion among women within the freedom movement. Finally, text added to the published document by an unknown individual creates the impression that the authors emphasized women's oppression in society and their subordination inside the movement to a greater extent than appeared in the original.

I began theorizing about digital archives when I stumbled upon online copies of digitized audiotapes from a significant feminist conference, The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later (1979). Using my training as an oral historian, I transcribed the audiotapes of Audre Lorde's remarks that became her famed essay "The Master's Tools." I became curious about the grassroots Black feminists who participated in this event. This investigation led to a nonlinear web essay about using online search engines to research marginalized historical subjects.⁴ In turn, writing that piece led me to draft guidelines for ethical research practices in digital archives.⁵

I offer these examples of my work to emphasize that digital history is impossible to pin down to one particular approach or outcome. What my projects have in common is a reliance on a core research process. I begin with a historical question that seems to have a potential digital history answer. Each question requires careful consideration of the most suitable approach and the most appropriate archives.For instance, in my analysis of the correspondence of Carolee Schneemann, a feminist performance artist, I initially worked from an edited collection of her letters. I soon realized the volume contained insufficient evidence to provide insights into her connections to other feminist activists, which led me back to the archive to locate more female correspondents.⁶

What happened next is...