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The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

Sep 12, 20246 min read

The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

Bibliography

Putnam, L. (2016). The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast. The American Historical Review, 121(2), 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377

Abstract

This essay explores the consequences for historians’ research of the twinned transnational and digitized turns. The accelerating digitization of primary and secondary sources and the rise of full-text web-based search to access information within them has transformed historians’ research practice, radically diminishing the role of place-specific prior expertise as a prerequisite to discovery. Indeed, we can now find information without knowing where to look. This has incited remarkably little reflection among mainstream historians, but the consequences are profound. What has become newly possible? How do the new digital affordances relate to the current boom in transnational topics and approaches? How do the reach, speed, and granularity of digitized search impact our ability to reconstruct the supranational past? This essay heralds the novel forms of knowledge-generation made possible by technological transformations. It also attempts an accounting of all the ancillary learning that international research in an analog world once required. What kinds of knowledge and insight did place-based research across borders instill? What are the intellectual and political consequences of leaving that behind?

Notes

Synopsis

Go to annotation“THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IS accelerating simultaneously with the digital turn, and it is no coincidence. Source digitization has transformed historians’ practice in ways that facilitate border-crossing research in particular. Web-based full-text search decouples data from place. In doing so, it dissolves the structural constraints that kept history bound to political-territorial units long after the intellectual liabilities of that bond were well known. Digital search has become the unacknowledged handmaiden of transnational history. It is time to take stock of what that partnership enables—and what it obscures.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 377)

“Ultimately, there is nothing inherently equalizing about the conjoined digitized and transnational turns. But one can hope. The changes in the information landscape that have lowered the barriers to international research by scholars from the Global North may increase their interest in the kinds of scholarly connection that can diffuse resources in new directions. Deep maps could provide new venues for international encounter and exchange. Virtual communication could lead to sustained collaboration. There could even be plane tickets. Putting scholars into new places for extended stays—including but not only from the Global South into the Global North and vice versa—has a great track record of building depth, contextualization, and geopolitical awareness. Digital research that carries us deeper into real-world connection may indeed create the border-crossing wisdom that our border-riven world needs.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 401)

Notes

  • Digitization decouples data from place, which has implications on search and sharing practices. Some things become easier, but less contextualised.

  • Important is, that most researchers do qualtitative research, not quantitative. And that is problematic if data is decoupled from place.

  • Digitized and digital turn driven by two developments: JSTOR and others make sci. papers available online starting 1990s. Mid-2000s start of massively digitized primary and secondary sources.

  • This development is especially impacting researching the international past.

    • Go to annotation“The disintermediation characteristic of digital information flow shrugs away the nation- and empirespecific archives, indices, and historiographies that have been central gatekeepers within historians’ practice.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 380)
    • Go to annotation“side-glancing and borderless term-searching radically change the questions we are likely to ask and the stories we are able to tell.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 380)

  • The old ways of doing historic research accomodated empire of the past as well as present (through costs and reinforcing the nation-state)

  • But there was no alternative. Go to annotation“Didn’t you lose them on the other side of the street?” “Yeah, but the light’s better here.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 382)

  • Transnational research predates Google Books of course, but only were it was feasable to do so.

  • Digitization, peaking inside and full-text-searching sources enabled side-glancing as a common practice. Go to annotation“It routinizes peripheral vision that opens us to the possibility of cross-border dynamics of manifold scales and kinds.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 384). Which is in favor of transnational research. It also enabled research across scales.

  • This new practices established themselves quick and are now favored over non-digitized sources.

  • Despite lowering the needed resources for research, these new digitized-enabled approaches are Go to annotation“not inherently egalitarian, open, or cost-free” (Putnam, 2016, p. 389).

  • Digitization follows the contours of Empire, by digitizing first its own sources and not marginalised ones.

  • Go to annotation“Yet history still means interpretation.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 390). Growing sources and easy access and searchability also means there are enough “facts” around to fit to one’s thesis.

  • It’s unavoidable, that there is always also something missing. But efforts have to be made to capture “the more difficult forms of the noncanonical, the non-Western, the non-elite and the quotidian—the materials that capture the lives and thoughts of the least powerful in society” (Putnam, 2016, p. 391)

  • The work, that had to be put into researching sources, is lost in decontextualized search. We picked up way more things before, although accidentaly. What’s lost in digital search is  seredipity and contextualisation

  • Go to annotation“Now you glance, you fish, you feast. But how much do you really know about the sources you find: about where they’re coming from, literally, politically, culturally?” (Putnam, 2016, p. 394)

  • International access is still very much divided between the global north and south.

  • Go to annotation“Literary critic Shalini Puri articulates the value of fieldwork in the humanities, underlining the multifaceted impact of presence. Fieldwork notonly“invitesusto achieve a textured and embodied knowledge ofplace,”butofferstheirreplaceable contribution of “render[[Putnam, 2016, p. 396

  • Geo-tagged data is a way out of area and nation-thinking, so called deep maps.

In the end, our digitized sources are only a part of all available sources, and those again, are only representing a part of all of existence.

Go to annotation“There is a real world out there. The totality of sentences that have ended up in print in no way corresponds to the proportions of past human life.” (Putnam, 2016, p. 400)

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