history experts

history experts

The Evolution of Historical Scholarship: From Antiquity to the Digital Age

1. Introduction to the Evolution of Historical Scholarship

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of historical scholarship. While rooted in the ancient Near East, and then later developed to its classical expression in Greece and Rome, its revival in the West can be traced to Renaissance Italy. Disciplines such as history and sociology have since developed and have a scope of study that reaches back to sources created in ancient times that are housed both in public and private collections. The Enlightenment, characterized by the disruption of existing hierarchies including traditional religious authority, and the birth of the modern sovereign state led to the development of the historiography that we know today. As historiography developed it split into positivist and interpretative paradigms. The development of historical research in universities contributed to the ancillary development of close links between teaching and research. The development of historical scholarship in the West had a ripple effect globally primarily through imperial expansion and colonization.

In the early 21st century, a new digital age has emerged that provides challenges, opportunities, debates, and transformations in the conduct of recording, researching, teaching, learning, and promoting historical scholarship for scholars, students, and the general public. This chapter highlights how historians of the past conducted their work, the institutional environment in which history is housed, and the rise of methodologies suited to the digital age. Common practices and new opportunities created for the conduct of historical scholarship through digital technology, applications, features, solutions, and platforms finally illustrate a paradigm shift in the research cycle of recording, researching, teaching, learning, and promoting historical knowledge and understanding using digital tools.

2. Key Theories and Methodologies in Historical Research

Dr. Toyama provides an exhaustive and highly valuable overview of the evolution of historical research. Historians and students of history should check this article as reference material to obtain a detailed summary of the evolution of theory, methods, challenges, and the future possibilities of historical scholarship. Articles on historical research published in highly reputed history journals are significant sources of historical scholarship. They are repositories of book reviews and provide avenues of scholarly communication. They portray varied facets of what counts as valid, ethical, and reasonable scholarly controversies. Finally, the cost makes subscription unaffordable to a majority of institutions, scholars, and wannabe scholars. Open access generation helps lower these costs by removing performative and solely beneficial practices for publishers. In scholarly terms, open access eliminates the subscription and price barriers to access the work.

There is a connection between theory and methods in historical research. Despite the usual advice that history must be driven by evidence and that patterns and relationships in data are primary to theory, many contemporary historians seem to do without them. They neither feel the pull to estimate regularities from data nor do they seem to have a seat of patterns in data from others as part of their research outputs. This is the philosophy. It would be deeply ironic if historical theory were being marshaled in the service of a positivist method that was pushing historical practice in the direction of a more disciplinary spread of pale imitation of contemporary social sciences of much of methods requiring sophisticated models, large datasets, and in some sense of technical experts in graduate programs.

3. Technological Innovations and their Impact on Historical Studies

It should not be assumed that technological innovations inevitably result in improvements in historical methodology, but it is certainly the case that a shift in methodologies is a result of a change in technological capacity. It is simply not possible to analyze a broad range of social phenomena present in a modern society (a refugee migration, for example) using the analytical tools of an era based on elite written accounts or other forms of historical documentation. The rise of IT has had a profound impact on the collection, storage, analysis, and publication of historical information. This can be seen from its effects on the tools of palaeography (the study of handwriting) and diplomatics (the study of what is documentary evidence) through to the systems of academic publication.

IT tools for historians can now include not only word processing and spreadsheet software but the use of specialized packages allowing the fast and accurate analysis of raw data (geographical information systems, or GIS, for instance, now play a critical role in anchoring historical studies, and yet being analogical, are only appreciated by a minority of humanities students). Further, the web now enables both fast and affordable exchanges of ideas and research results (the trenchant critic of this “support” for historians is “scholasticism”), and the proceedings of academic conferences, taking the place and extending the functionality of the academic journal, can be easily put online and globally available. Lastly, this technology jump also irradiates some virtues of historical way of thinking as resilience, caution, professional attention to in-depth and the overcoming of some aspects of “on the surface” ideas (not all, however).

4. Contemporary Debates and Future Directions in Historical Scholarship

Future directions in historical scholarship are both shaped by ongoing conversations specific to the practice of historical research and historical representation, as well as by larger changes in information technology and the structure of employment in higher education, all shaped by both the needs and strengths of digital methods. Though these debates continue to be shaped by many of the same questions and problems confronting earlier generations of historians, the current array of debates forced by the digital age contain their own challenges. Questions about the fundamental nature and interests of historians reappear. In 2014, for example, Jo Guldi and David Armitage insisted that we must lose faith in non-historical ways of representing the world, or we will misunderstand everything, while, in a widely discussed response, Daniel Lord Smail argued that we risked ceding the definition of history to other disciplines by insisting on a universal theory of history.

Other conversations have been updated with concerns about labor, intellectual property, and the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of digital tools. Moreover, amidst the understandable focus on the content effects of digital publication, we cannot lose sight of earlier and continuing historical debate about the extent to which digital publishers and libraries continue to define terms for historical scholarship, or whether they instead create new opportunities and new expectations for the authoring control by historians of their own representations and expressions. While these are not new conversations, they are nonetheless fundamental questions, and they are being considered, opposed, and otherwise answered as historians continue to struggle with the commitments and advantages of working on the disciplinary boundary.