Ian Milligan's "History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research"

     Ian Milligan is a Professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is also the Associate Vice-President, Research and Oversight Analysis for UW's Office of Research. Milligan's research focuses Canadian history, particularly social movements in Canada, and Digital history, looking closely at the history of the Internet. Milligan has authored three books, one of which is the topic of discussion in this blog post, and has been a part of a plethora of other projects that revolve around digital history.


    Milligan's History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research has a few central claims and objectives. Perhaps the most pressing is that modern historians will have a vastly different source base than our predecessors. Milligan highlights the explosion of born-digital primary sources, and how these digital sources have their pros and cons. While Milligan encourages the wider use of born-digital sources and web-based archives, he also identifies a rift between historians and technology and techniques that are used to properly use the web as an effect tool for research. I would argue that Milligan's main objective of this book is to introduce historians to the world of digital history, explain the benefits of digital sources and their pitfalls, and ultimately how historians need to evolve to both us these online sources and to work in interdisciplinary groups to develop better tools for historians to parse through data more efficiently.

    One particularly interest portion of the book for me was regarding metadata in chapter three. I have worked with metadata before, but even after completing a few sheets I realized I had a vague idea of what it actually was or what was its purpose. As Milligan rightly puts it, "Metadata is a surprisingly difficult concept to define, especially once we move beyond the shorthand and generally insufficient definition of 'data about data.'" (127) Before, I my definition was that metadata was "data about data" and that its purpose was to help it easier to find in a search engine. Milligan provides a much larger picture, however. Using Edward Snowden's infamous NSA leak and his own metadata regarding his Google Mail account, Milligan provides examples on how metadata is more than an aid for a search engine. A conglomeration of metadata is important data in itself. While Milligan points out that one of its primary uses is to help condense information on from a single webpage, the synthesis of metadata information can be used to more efficiently do research. For example, Old Bailey Online has London court proceedings from 1674-1913. There is no way a historian or even a research team can individually go through every court document. However, with metadata, it is easier to see the important data of court proceeding, such as the gender of defendants and prosecutors and what crimes are the accused being tried for. The metadata makes the reading of an overbearing amount of documents possible and allows historians to see relationships much easier than if they were to go through documents one by one. 

    Milligan's work is a good start to this course as it has made me think about how working on digital history projects now is in the best interest of historians for the future. Historians who have not started need to begin educating themselves on how to effectively use the internet in their research and assist when they can to add to the ever growing historical data online. As Milligan mentions throughout his book, technology is rapidly changing, programs and browsers that we use today to store data may not be here in 10 years so it is important that web-archives like the Internet Archives has support to continue their work, as well as the support of historians to help develop new and effective ways to use the Archives in new historical research.       
    To conclude, here are three questions I had while I was reading:

1.  How did Edward Snowden's NSA open a wider discussion about metadata?

2. In regards to different countries legal deposits, what are some ethical questions brought about during domain crawls?

3. Last week we talked with Ross regarding a variety of digital history tools and programs. If Milligan were to create an aid to his book using a digital history tool, which program do you think he would choose and why? (Opinionated)

*Edit after publication*

I forgot to add my questions regarding the main chapters I read, so they are below-

Chapter 3 Questions:

1. How does Milligan describe webpages?

2. How did Milligan use Edward Snowden's NSA leak to introduce metadata?

3. In what way does Milligan use metadata and hyperlinks to research Canadian Political Parties?

Chapter 4 Questions: 

1. What is the Wayback Machine? How is it 'deceptively simple'? What are some technical limitations of the Wayback Machine

2. Many of the sections in this chapter talk about different types of computing tasks, such as the Shine Interface, Archives Unleashed, Cloud Computing, etc. How do these show the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation of historians? 

3. Why are National Library Legal Deposits "double edged sword[s]"?


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