Towards Big Data: Digitising Economic and Business History

This chapter describes the experiences in computational and digital history of economic and business historians who for decades have been forerunners in digital history data gathering and computational analysis. It attempts to discuss the major developments within this area internationally and, in some specific cases, in Finland in the fields of digital economic and business history. It concentrates on a number of research projects that the authors have previously been involved in, as well as research outcomes by other economic and business historians within Finland and elsewhere. It is not claimed that the projects discussed are unique or ahead of their time in the field of economic and business history—on the contrary they are representing a more general state of the art within the field and used as illustrative cases illuminating the possibilities and challenges facing historians in the digital era.

The Many Ways to Talk about the Transits of Venus: Astronomical Discourses in Philosophical Transactions, 1753–1777

This chapter uses topic modelling to explore the evolution of the scientific discourse in the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions in the mid-18th century. Combining cultural historical close reading and statistical topic modelling, the study demonstrates the value of combining ‘new’ and more traditional historical research methods. The study shows that there were at least nine ways of talking about astronomical observations around the two transits of Venus, in 1761 and 1768, and in this reveal several previously neglected themes and unnoticed temporal discourse changes. One notable theme when talking about experiments was the continuity regarding concern for exactness and reliability of the collected knowledge, while others indicate a significant use of algebra to explain astronomical events and that the amount of causal theories has weakened over time. The study furthermore documents a connection between politeness and strategic attention seeking using the transits of Venus. Finally, the results reveal significant astronomical conversations related to terrestrial weather, and the circumstances and equipment of experimenting and observing.

Evolving Conceptualisations of Internationalism in the UK Parliament: Collocation Analyses from the League to Brexit

This chapter explores a historical distant reading strategy of British Parliamentary discourse. It uses historical collocation analyses of ‘internationalism’ and the ‘international’ in the British Hansard Corpus and a selection of Commons and Lords debates concerning British membership in international organisations as it relates to the League of Nations, United Nations, Council of Europe, EEC and Brexit. The collocates that were deemed to be politically significant are grouped in 13 loose semantic fields. This macro-level analysis of long-term trends of discourse is supplemented with an analysis of the said key debates in their historical contexts, including comparisons between the two Houses, and with additional micro-level analyses of contextualised individual speeches in which politicians defined ‘internationalism’ by using the concepts in political action. This provides one general view on the historical evolvement of the discourse on internationalism over the past hundred years.

Towards Digital Histories of Women’s Suffrage Movements: A Feminist Historian’s Journey to the World of Digital Humanities

This chapter discusses the various practical, epistemological and methodological issues of importance when a historical scholar with limited digital skills wants to take a step towards learning how to conduct digital analyses. As a feminist historian, the author combines this approach with a discussion of the relation of feminist research and digital humanities. In line with practice in feminist research, she uses a self-reflexive approach and asks how the increase in the understanding of digital methods influences research questions in feminist history. Do digital humanities tools transform the work as feminist historians? How can digital analyses develop the field of gender history in general and the history of feminism in particular? Can a scholar who has limited technological skills engage with an informed and critical discussion with digitised materials? In doing this the chapter provides an inside reflective history of the making of digital history.

Manuscripts, Qualitative Analysis and Features on Vectors: An Attempt for a Synthesis of Conventional and Computational Methods in the Attribution of Late Medieval Anti-Heretical Treatises

The article applies computational stylometry to explore medieval authorship. The study consists of the investigation of different versions of an anti-heretical treatise Refutatio errorum, only recently attributed to the inquisitor Petrus Zwicker based on qualitative evidence. The article confirms this attribution and demonstrates that from a textually inconsistent corpus, it is possible to prepare data for computational stylometry with relatively fast and straightforward cleaning. Finally, the article discusses the relationship between qualitative and computational methods in the study of medieval texts. The greatest added value of computational authorship attributions comes from unexpected results, from texts behaving in an anomalous way. In the classifications made for this study, a small work called Attendite a falsis prophetis was for the first time attributed to Petrus Zwicker, a prime example of an unanticipated result. This attribution is within possibilities, but its final corroboration requires codicological study of the preserved manuscripts.

The Long Road to ‘Digital History’: History of Computer-Assisted Research of the Past in Finland since the 1960s

To understand better the present shape and evolution of the digital history, this chapter examines how historians have used computers and information technology since the 1960s. Focusing on historians from Finland, the chapter starts from the late 1960s when a few younger historians first explored using the computer to perform statistical calculations. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the computers and data available were most useful and used for historical research designs applying quantitative methods. Historians carrying out qualitative research grew interested in IT when the personal computers became more user-friendly and affordable towards and especially during the 1990s. In the following decade, the internet, the World Wide Web, and digitized source materials effected all historians’ research practices directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, digital or computational history introduced in the mid-2010s took the use of IT further. These new methods were first embraced by a fraction of those historians who had previously focused on quantitative work based on textual materials. A central conclusion is that historians should pay more attention to the technologies they use to take better control of the challenges and opportunities of their changing research environment.

All the Work that Makes It Work: Digital Methods and Manual Labour

The chapter explores how digital graphs, maps and trees can reveal things never seen before, but how they may also hide all the manual work that lies behind them. The most basic rationale behind digital humanities is the idea that machines should do most of the dull tasks for us. If all the extracting, counting, matching, and plotting is left to computers, researchers can focus on the intellectual parts of the process, interpreting and presenting the results. In many cases, however, digital tools need assistance to work properly. This kind of manual or semi-automatic work may involve compiling, cleaning and filtering datasets, tagging images, transcribing texts, correcting bad matches, adjusting graphs, and so on. Yet, it is rare to see it mentioned when results are presented. The aim of this chapter is to describe and discuss the role of this invisible (semi-)manual work within digital research.

Building Historical Knowledge Byte by Byte: Infrastructures and Data Management in Modern Scholarship

This chapter describes how the new emerging digital environment challenges historians’ existing training and practice of source criticism. In an environment with increasing amounts of digitized data and digital methods there are new requirements for historians to develop new skills as well as new more extensive provenance data. Historians are faced with new challenges regarding new increasing demands for transparency and open scholarship that has comes with the growth of digital humanities in general and with digital history in particular. The old demands that historical research has to be well documented and reproducible has to be adapted to the promises and pitfalls of the new digital environment which especially means developing and adapting new standards and practices for what counts as good data management. The study discusses how the FAIR data principles can offer valuable guidance, but also how they cannot be implemented without supporting services that take into account different types of data and the data lifecycle.

Macroscoping the Sun of Socialism: Distant Readings of Temporality in Finnish Labour Newspapers, 1895–1917

This chapter examines the socialist perception of time in the Grand Duchy of Finland at the turn of 20th century focusing on the way working people experienced the present. Three distant reading methods are used on newspaper data to extract information on the socialist temporality: relative word frequencies over time, collocates, and key collocates. The point of historical distant reading methods is explained by using a simple theoretical model illuminating the scholar’s intellectual journey from original sources to historical wisdom. The results show that the General Strike of 1905 increased newspaper references to the present within the labour movement. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that socialist newspapers portrayed the present as negative, systematic and changeable and with an extraordinary level of negativity as compared to competing political languages. The study broadens the understanding of socialist temporality in general and Finnish socialism’s most important symbol, the rising sun, in particular. The sun’s meaning has been connected to freedom in the future, but simultaneously the sun highlighted the shackles of capitalism in the present.