Digital History: Towards New Methodologies

The field of Digital Humanities is changing the way historians do their research. Historians use tools to query larger data sets and they apply a different methodology to tackle certain research questions. In this paper we will discuss two propositions on the necessity of adapting to and taking advantage of the technological changes: (1) Digital Humanities tools are not the enemy of the historian, but they need to be used in a proper way. This requires historians to make 'tool criticism' part of their methodological toolkit; (2) Digital Humanities tools allow for a more data-driven and bottom-up approach to historical research. This eliminates some of the historian's preconceptions that are inevitably part of more traditional historical research.