“The Best of Old and New: Historical Scholarship Meets Digital Technology”: Scott Richard St. Louis on Ian Milligan’s *The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age*

In a thought-provoking contribution to the “Elements” series of micro-monographs published by Cambridge University Press, historian Ian Milligan – Associate Vice President for Research Oversight and Analysis at the University of Waterloo – calls for a subtle reorientation of his discipline, specifically toward greater focus on four dimensions of scholarly life: “understanding the importance of digital literacy, recognizing the value of interdisciplinarity, prioritizing methodological discussions and reflections, and finally, changing part of our training process.”[1] The reflections that lead to this conclusion are brief, but substantive. In less than eighty pages, Milligan considers the dramatic extent to which the habits and circumstances of working historians have changed over the past two or three decades, a span of time influenced by digital technology’s profound transformations to culture and economy alike. His goal, then, is to engage colleagues in the process of learning “how we can be better scholars by making the digital explicit […] to equip historians to be self-conscious practitioners in a digital age […] actively using technology rather than being shaped by it.”[2] Milligan organizes his thoughts into three main sections after the introduction: “Libraries and Databases” precedes “Archives and Access,” which comes before “Publishing in an Interdisciplinary Age,” itself followed by a brief conclusion.

In “Libraries and Databases,” Milligan ponders whether “the best parallel to our contemporary moment” might be “the early-twentieth century move to store documents on microfilm. Indeed, microfilm in the 1930s raised utopian hopes around universal access to all knowledge, as well as its long-term stewardship and preservation.”[3] He explains that such hopes were chastened by the difficulties of using microfilm machines, and by the commercialization of microfilm production and distribution. Even so, Milligan displays neither knee-jerk tendentiousness nor sophomoric miscalculation at the intersection of business and information science, quoting Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle’s observation that Eugene Power’s company University Microfilms – predecessor to ProQuest, now owned by Clarivate  – “transformed small libraries into holders of collections that only the largest libraries could dream of.”[4] Like it or not, commercial considerations play an important role in the development and circulation of cultural heritage materials and other scholarly resources.

To Milligan, microfilm additionally “illustrates that the mediation of historical sources through technology has a long history: projects became feasible thanks to microfilm, and undoubtedly sources were selected depending on whether they had been put onto reels. The historical profession constantly engages with and is shaped by new and emerging technologies.”[5] Consequently, historians must always be ready to turn their critical skills inward, taking account of the various forces – larger than any one person – that influence their choices as they carry out their work. Scholarship never happens in a vacuum.

Much of what we can learn from microfilm about the challenge and opportunity of the historian’s craft remains applicable to our age of large-scale digitization, in no small part because “searchable historical databases” owe much of their original creation to the mass scanning of microfilm.[6] Milligan notes that optical character recognition (OCR) technology “arose in a context of needing to make sense of large bodies of documents, such as in corporate legal discovery. Enterprising individuals realized that this technology could be used in other domains such as searching decades of historical newspapers.”[7] Here, then, are some of the technological and commercial factors shaping the rise of companies such as Cold North Wind, in Canada, and Ancestry, in the United States.[8] Milligan sees a possible trade-off at play: “If the roots of mass digitization had been laid in volunteer projects like Project Gutenberg or scholarly grant-funded activities, the story would have been different” in that “digitized holdings would be more accessible but rarer.”[9] Colossal scale thus “comes at a cost” of paywalls that “become a major barrier to those without institutional affiliation” and that deepen “the divide between richer and poorer universities.”[10] As machine learning promises to expand the scope of materials amenable to OCR – an advancement Milligan describes on page 21 – it will only become more important for historians to explore the influences behind, and consequences of, what becomes digitized and what does not. To “properly contextualize their use of digitized primary sources,” Milligan recommends that historians improve their understanding of “algorithmic bias” and “source mediation and context.”[11] More specifically, Milligan also calls for “citing the trails that we follow” to locate various sources, not merely the sources themselves, in order to promote critical “reflection around whether the medium was influencing the way in which historical knowledge was constructed.”[12] Milligan proposes the incorporation of “substantial digital literacy skills […] early in the historical curriculum” to prepare students for the technological landscape that awaits them.[13] After all, a majority of scholars in the humanities – not to mention major swaths of the contemporary workforce – already are navigating this landscape to one extent or another.

In “Archives and Access,” Milligan draws attention to the “interdisciplinary gulf between historians and archivists,” describing the origins of this distance as a “professional divorce” illustrated by the 1975 establishment of the Association of Canadian Archivists, which stepped away “from its previous professional home as the Archives Section of the Canadian Historical Association.”[14] In the United States, the Society of American Archivists emerged out of the American Historical Association in the 1930s. While archivists came to understand their workplaces “correctly” as “sites of active engagement and construction,” Milligan contends that “historians tended to see archives as static places.”[15] In the age of digitization, though, it becomes increasingly clear that archivists occupy something of an upstream position relative to historians in the workflows that yield new historical knowledge: “many of the active decisions come from the archivist and document owner. During the selection process, as well as the generation of finding aids and metadata, as well as the selection of material to be digitized, the archivist is an active intellectual actor as much as the historian who follows in their footsteps.”[16] Complicating matters still further is the proliferation of born-digital primary source material: “The selection role of the archivist has evolved, as archivists worry about triage by IT professionals as well as the sheer explosion of digital records.”[17] Occupying fertile ground at the crossroads of technology and history, today’s archivists know very well that the composition of scholarship is shaped deeply by the choices of those whose names do not appear on the covers of prestigious books. (To be fair, archivists often do appear in the acknowledgments.) Milligan thus shrewdly observes that interdisciplinarity for a historian begins with their first step into an archival facility, whether they know it or not. After all, many archivists, curators, and librarians today are keen to develop skills that history classes usually do not (and probably should not) teach: agile project management methodologies for cross-functional teams, API interaction for data extraction and manipulation, basic-to-intermediate programming for automating mundane tasks at scale, cloud computing for big data management and digital preservation, copyright law for institutional compliance, statistics for impact reporting, user experience research for software development, web accessibility, and more.

Milligan also explains in “Archives and Access” that digital photography has altered the approach historians take to archival visits. Collecting survey responses from more than 250 historians based in Canada in 2019, Milligan learned that 95 percent of them used digital cameras during their research trips to archives.[18] While such a transformation is concerning in some respects – “collection and analysis work best when connected” rather than when they are “bifurcated into discrete stages” of travel and home – it is likewise true that less time away can yield valuable savings of time and money, two resources in very short supply for many historians.[19]  To Milligan, historians dealing with this widespread transformation of the research process could benefit from formal training in digital photography, while other stakeholders could benefit from historians sending their project photographs back to archival organizations when appropriate.[20] Digital photography has already influenced historians’ working habits to such an extent that Tropy, a personal tool for managing research photographs, launched in October 2017 after development by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Milligan observes of the tool that “users are forced to think about metadata and its importance when developing their personal research collections […] as they cite, take notes, and later recall the photographs that they assembled.”[21] Perhaps digital technology can assist archivists and historians in understanding each other on some kind of deeper level.

In the following section, on publishing, Milligan describes the proliferation of form enabled by the digital age: “Historical work is published not only in books and articles, the traditional career publishing milestones, but also databases, online exhibits, new media projects, blogs, and other platforms such as Wikipedia.”[22] Milligan sees conventional tenure and promotion practices holding back more widespread experimentation, lamenting that “as a self-regulating profession we are our own worst enemies […] career milestones remain somewhat narrow and conservative. Publishing operates in a prestige economy […] there is some truth to more prestigious venues tending towards more rigorous peer review […] [but] this link does not always hold true for individual books.”[23] Fortunately, however, some recent projects do reveal exciting possibilities for combining the best of old and new. Cameron Blevins, for example, published a book with Oxford University Press in 2021 titled Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West: “Blevins explores the expansion of the American postal network, arguing that the sheer scale of the postal system – almost 60,000 post offices and 400,000 miles of mail routes – requires digital methods to understand […] Importantly, Blevins released the dataset that underpinned the project […] and the code used to generate [the dataset] is also available.”[24] While innovation in the forms that historical scholarship can take will necessitate sufficiently robust approaches to digital preservation – a sustainability concern that Milligan explores on page 58 – one can only imagine the rewarding possibilities that await historians who combine traditional skills with hands-on fluency in the realms of emerging technology.

While Milligan is firm in the belief that his fellow scholars “need to recognize that they are living through a major change in how historical research is carried out,” he also recognizes that “the application of our fundamental skills of seeking context and accumulating knowledge will serve both society and the historical profession well in the digital age.”[25] Consequently, he proposes “small, incremental tweaks” that “can put historians on a more rigorous path” to the benefit of scholars and citizens alike.[26] For a valuable synthesis of old and new to proceed, historians would do well to take Milligan’s explorations, recommendations, and provocations seriously, as a starting point for still more conversation about the future of studying the past.

In the end, a difficult question: amid an aggregate context of stagnant or declining majors, stagnant or declining monograph sales, and thus stagnant or declining traditional prospects for newly minted PhDs, how can historians – with integrity – combine the best of their unique approach to understanding the world with opportunities to hunt where the deer are? Milligan’s work offers a meaningful contribution to some of the most vexing occupational questions facing historians today. This reviewer, while hopeful, can offer no answers.

[1] Ian Milligan, The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), page 60.

[2] Ibid., pages 4-9, emphasis in the original.

[3] Ibid., page 10.

[4] Ibid., page 13.

[5] Ibid., page 14, emphasis in the original.

[6] Ibid., page 15.

[7] Ibid., page 15.

[8] Ibid., pages 15-16.

[9] Ibid., page 15.

[10] Ibid., page 16.

[11] Ibid., page 27.

[12] Ibid., page 28.

[13] Ibid., page 28.

[14] Ibid., pages 30-32.

[15] Ibid., page 32.

[16] Ibid., page 30.

[17] Ibid., page 30.

[18] Ibid., page 34.

[19] Ibid., page 35.

[20] Ibid., pages 34-36.

[21] Ibid., page 37.

[22] Ibid., page 44.

[23] Ibid., pages 44-47.

[24] Ibid., page 54, links added.

[25] Ibid., pages 63-64.

[26] Ibid., page 60.