Digital revolution and the future of history

 For the past years I have come to focus more and more on digital humanities both consciously and subconsciously. Starting with the conscious part I have undertaken a research project on creating digital archival collections in which I aim to investigate the ethical practices within


the archival sector when creating new collections. I have also come to include perspectives in my teaching, were for instance teach course on AI and archival science at Lund university.

On a more subconscious level I have also come to work with material that is avaible online, such as in my thesis were much of my source material was already digitised. I have also come to use data-processing softwares such Nvivo and Tropy. Likewise much of the material use in my teaching consists of sources that are already digitized. This can be seen as digital revolution 1.5 with the first being the inclusion of digital tools such as cameras, computers and wordediting software which became available already in the 1980’s.

What I however came to realise a couple of weeks at a conference was that the technological development now have so far that digital practices is almost come il faut, or atleast not problematised in the same ways as before. Instead we can see a gradual shift were for instance digital newspapers archives are utilised, both scanned analog documents and digital born. 


In my view this is a process that started with the internet and we are now fully seeing it. In the comming years the first digital natives - those born after the digital revolution - will also enter academia and they probably have an entirely different approach to internet which opens up for at least two plausible consequences. 

The first one is rather positive and that is that restrictions on which history to write will be lessened. Back in the days when I was a student few history students wrote on themes of international history. This was largely due to that you had to physically visit an archive to write history, and this was for economic reasons tricky when you did not have financial backup. This digital change however circumnavigates this problem. 

Another problem will however arise and that is source criticism. Starting from working with digital born material, it is not impossible that the sources have been edited since their publication online. In theory it is possible to follow news reports hour by hour in this new setting, but it is also possible that material have gotten erased. Other scholars have also highlighted how algorithms often change user interference on for instant x, making it possible to misunderstand debates a couple of years later.

The solution this problem is perhaps not self-evident. My personal belief is that overtime new practices will evolve, where for instance basic technological literacy will be included in university history education. I also think that the time for this debate is perhaps not yet, but that we first need to adapt to this new situation. Once this adaption - which probably will happen spontaneously over the next couple of decades is done- we can actually start to discuss its implications for society. A common Greek curse was once “may you live in interesting times”, but right now I think that times for digitisation is interestingly and only in the positive sense.

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