- Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age by Adam Crymble
Historians have not been immune from the incursion of computing into their lives and work, increasingly influencing questions that they ask of historical evidence, which itself is either electronic or subject to reformulations, thanks to software. These effects were barely a whisper in the 1960s, but they became obvious with the arrival of personal computers, word-processing software, and database-management tools by the 1980s. Barely had historians begun to engage with these developments when the internet became a profoundly important new development. The profession, whether digitally “native” students or senior scholars, has to deal responsibly with all of it. Crymble’s history of how these issues evolved affords historians the opportunity to understand what is still an evolving transformation in how they work and think about their discipline.
Briefly stated, Crymble describes the impact of computers on the historian’s craft through an investigation of the subject from the 1960s to the present (yes, historians have been wrestling with computers for a half-century). The story is complex because many disciplines engaged with the technology, each using different vocabularies and concepts. In fact, Crymble includes a sensible glossary of the terms that have become increasingly popular in disciplines more comfortable with computing, hoping that more historians will adopt them. Although he is fixated on the use of a shared vocabulary, his book clearly demonstrates that historians, like scholars in other fields, walked many paths toward computing. They encountered computing in libraries, classrooms, and archival collections, as well as in writing and publishing.
Crymble explores the evolution of the relationship between historians and computing across five dimensions—historical research, archives, classrooms, self-learning, and “scholarly communications channels,” commonly known now as blogs (9). He devotes a chapter to each of these arenas of engagement. His terms and analyses are designed to allow scholars to speak with each other across disciplines and within subfields in history. The result is even better than might have been expected, because his writing is clear, sans jargon, despite its derivation from multiple disciplines, including computing.
Since more readers will have already encountered computing in one or more of the five dimensions, some of the material will be painfully obvious, especially the ad hoc methods by which people first learned how to use computers. Nonetheless, Crymble ably shows how developments in one context related to those in other contexts. In the process, he demonstrates that computing has been more important to the work of historians than one might otherwise have thought. He also argues that the loosely conceived notions about the role of computing, and their associated historiographical methods, are in need of greater discipline.
Crymble also makes some novel observations. For example, he describes the changes that team tables and collaboration have brought to classrooms, [End Page 439] often eliminating students having to line up for lectures. Moreover, the move to digital history syllabuses has given students and professors the opportunity to simplify their interactions even further. His bibliography reveals extensive, prior conversations about these issues. Chapter 5, which is devoted to the history of blogs in historical discourse, is so informative that it could serve as a second introduction, to be read before the rest of the book.
The volume is short, tightly written, and well organized, recommended as much for novices as for “gray heads” with many years of experience. Crymble is to be congratulated for bridging the gap across a confusing divide from the days before ubiquitous computing to those of Big Data, algorithms, the internet, and artificial intelligence, without losing half his audience in the process.