Digital and Distant Histories: Emergent Approaches within the New Digital History

The chapter introduces the main themes of “Digital Histories”. It shortly discusses the histories of digital history and the various research projects that resulted in this volume, as well as the main contributions of the individual chapters. Focusing on the most recent periods of development of digital and computational history, the introduction explains how this book contributes to advancing the larger field of history in two primary ways: firstly through conceptual explorations of the central issues characterizing the past, present and future of digital history research, and secondly by providing new empirical historical knowledge coming out of research using digital methods. The chapter surveys a number of key challenges and criticisms facing contemporary and future historians, including the digitisation of sources, metadata creation for digital source materials, digital source and resource criticism, and the various salient questions involved in organising digital history research.