Fall 2024: Digital History

    This week's material I have struggled to completely grasp, but I believe that that is more to the testament of how complex a question "who owns black data?" is than my own inability to understand (I hope). I think it is best to begin with the definition of what "black data" is. According to Jessica Johnson, data is "... an objective and independent unit of knowledge". I think it would then be safe to assume that "black data" is objective units of knowledge that pertain to Africana/African American/Black studies (from here on I will shorthand this to just Black studies, like Kim Gallon did in her chapter).      The question of ownership of black data is hard to answer because of a few reasons. Like many authors have pointed out, historical works, than being by print/digital projects as well as archives, are inherently racialized. Jessica Johnson mentions that "... blackness is most often constructed in proximity to bondage and the ris...

        This week's readings expanded on the history of digital history. William Thomas does a great job outlining the adolescence of the field. His chapter, written in 2004, points the origin of digital history to the late 1960s and early 1970s when historians were on going through a "culture war". He explains that during these decades there was a rise in quantitative history that came about with early computers. The culture war was between the historians who believed that quantitative history was more in line with social sciences and deviated away for the "traditional" way history was done, which was narrative history. To note, Thomas does point out that quantitative history was done even in the 1940s, but he is rather emphasizing the use of technology in the 1960s and 1970s allowed for a vastly larger amount of data to be computed with more efficiency.      William Thomas emphasizes these debates between historians with the example of the 1974 ...

      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 w...