Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age

If it is possible to boil a book down to a single word, for Adam Crymble's Technology and the Historian it would be negotiation. Crymble seamlessly integrates print, digital, oral history, and interactive source material to document the ways historians have responded, both individually and as an imagined community, to the social contexts that have shaped our interactions with technology. The summary in chapter 6 of the resulting negotiations that shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century historiographies about not just “digital history” but history generally, is worth a read for anyone engaged in the practice of history today. Crymble first introduces us to the technology-driven methodological affordances that have come into and out of vogue in response to external social and cultural changes. Chapter 1 breaks down several digital-history origin myths by making explicit the different interdisciplinarities that underpin these ebbs and flows in quantitative history and cultural analytics. Chapter 2 details varying regional digitization practices and preconceived assumptions about “importance” in source digitization. In particular, Crymble uses community digitization projects to illustrate the ways the too-general nature of the “digital history” label hides local and regional variation.