Doing History in a Digital Age

AHR Review Roundtable

History’s Future in the Age of the Internet

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DANIEL J. STORY, JO GULDI, TIM HITCHCOCK, AND
MICHELLE MORAVEC

A HISTORIAN’S RELATIONSHIP TO THEIR SOURCE BASE is in many ways fundamental to the

craft of history. Whether documents boxed in an archive, letters in an attic, newspapers
in a database, or testimony in an oral history, evidence, inevitably shaped by the me-
dium in which it was recorded and the means by which it has been preserved, grounds
the stories historians tell and the arguments they make.
In the last two decades, more and more of that evidentiary base has been brought
into the realm of the digital, and there is little doubt that this process will continue. But
what happens when a significant share of source material is “born digital”—that is, gen-
erated in digital form from the start? That is precisely what has been underway, begin-
ning in the early 1990s and accelerating since. With more of humanity than ever trans-
acting large amounts of their social, cultural, political, and economic lives online, how
could historians of the recent past ignore such a central bank of evidence? And how
could historians of all stripes in the decades to come write histories of this and subse-
quent eras without wrestling with some portion of this mountain of born-digital mate-
rial? How, for instance, could future historians write the history of the presidency of
Donald Trump, the #MeToo movement, or the #BlackLivesMatter movement without
engaging the evidence of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook?
These are the central challenges—and opportunities—that Ian Milligan presents and
interrogates in his 2019 History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transform-
ing Historical Research (McGill-Queen’s University Press). In this book, he provides
context for those wondering just how it was that the internet, or more precisely the
World Wide Web, came thundering into widespread use in the early 1990s, as well as
the ways in which libraries, archives, nonprofits, and for-profits have, by fits and starts,
attempted to back up the enormous human record that the web has, even in a very short
period, produced. He likewise acknowledges that backing up is not the same as pro-
cessing and cataloguing—in other words, making that material usable by researchers,
present and future. Librarians and archivists, Milligan notes, have made valiant strides
in this area, but much more than in pre-internet days, the task of sifting falls on histori-

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1338 AHR Review Roundtable

ans as well. This joint effort is necessitated by the vastness of the data and its complexi-
ty—hence the word “abundance” in the book’s title. According to Milligan, historians
who wish to grapple with the archived internet, or who wish to prepare their graduate
students for such a task, need to think much more aggressively about engaging with
digital methods and tools that can complement and extend the well-honed practices of
close reading with approaches that can help to analyze the vast and often unstructured

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archives of internet data. At the same time, Milligan spends considerable time grappling
with the reality that wading into this new “archive” presents serious ethical questions
about the original intent of the creator of this blog entry, that forum post, or the obscure
website. At least for the embryonic portions of this material—in particular, content
from the 1990s—many, perhaps most, internet users had little inkling that what they
were creating would be preserved, widely circulated, and even mined by scholars in
later decades. Taken together, the practical and conceptual issues Milligan covers serve
as a kind of primer on the emerging landscape of internet archiving and, perhaps, as a
handbook for historians moving into that realm of research. For Milligan, there are
compelling reasons to think this will form a substantial and increasing share of histori-
ans’ work in the decades to come.
In line with the journal’s continued drive to engage published scholarship in new
ways, AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein, consulting editor Lara Putnam, and I convened an
AHR Review Roundtable as part of our first contribution to a new section in the AHR
dedicated to interrogating and grappling with the kinds of issues Milligan puts forward.
Doing History in a Digital Age, which will in the future feature contributions by schol-
ars on the intersection of the digital age and history, seemed like an ideal venue for a
creative consideration of Milligan’s work. We invited three historians—Jo Guldi, Tim
Hitchcock, and Michelle Moravec, all of whom incorporate digital approaches and con-
cerns into their work—to engage with a set of questions that I developed about Milli-
gan’s book. We then invited Ian Milligan to respond to the reviewers’ comments.
On the whole, Guldi, Hitchcock, and Moravec welcome Milligan’s treatment of the
digital archive of the web and its implications for historians’ work. They also tend to
agree that, generally speaking, historians have remained woefully reluctant to engage
the issues Milligan raises, believing them to be of lesser significance, too complicated,
or simply irrelevant. At the same time, the reviewers point to areas where Milligan’s
analysis could be extended, for instance, in interrogating more critically the concept of
the “archive,” addressing public policy issues rather than just the scholarly ethics of in-
ternet data privacy, and acknowledging that training in new digital skills might be car-
ried out not only for historical professionals but also for undergraduates.
Milligan offers a well-rounded and generous response to these insights and cri-
tiques. He emphasizes his aim of arguing for change within the system rather than a
radical transformation of the historian’s work. The discipline of history, he contends,
possesses many valuable qualities—he only hopes that the discipline will take the nec-
essary steps to apply those qualities to the emerging digital archive of the internet age.
DANIEL J. STORY
University of California, Santa Cruz

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 History’s Future in the Age of the Internet 1339

Daniel J. Story: Ian Milligan’s History in the Age of Abundance? is not your typical
treatment of digital history.1 Its focus is not on how historians can apply digital meth-
ods to the study of the longer-term past. Instead, Milligan’s concern is the immediate
and longer-term future of the historical discipline and how it will fare as the primary
sources of so much of contemporary life pile up, so to speak, in the digital realm of the
internet. As he puts it in the book’s introduction, for historians writing histories of the

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more recent past, “to neglect the web would ignore the main medium for communica-
tion, publishing, social interaction, commercial enterprise, and creative activity since
the 1990s.” For example, how could future historians possibly do justice to the #MeToo
movement, Milligan writes, without drawing from the records of social media and on-
line news sources?2 This is the central challenge—and opportunity—that Milligan’s
book poses to the historical profession.
Let’s start with your reactions to Milligan’s overarching arguments, including, if
you wish, reframing or extending my brief summation. What one or two aspects of His-
tory in the Age of Abundance? most grabbed your attention, and why?

Jo Guldi: In part, History in the Age of Abundance? represents a systematic inquiry

into the nature of web-born documents, from the ideas of networked information sys-
tems propounded in the 1940s to their instantiation under federally funded defense
grants in the 1970s. Milligan gives a history of efforts to collect, catalogue, and investi-
gate modern information born on the worldwide web, arguing persuasively for the im-
portance of archival expeditions that are little known to many traditional historians—
among them, the work of the Internet Archive, the University of North Texas, and the
British Library. He deconstructs HTML and discusses in detail the challenges of archiv-
ing and interpreting web-born documents. He traces the life of cliometrics in the 1970s
and “distant reading” in the 2000s, outlining the birth of the modern digital humanities,
and detailing the limits of its influence over the profession at large.

Tim Hitchcock: The overarching narrative laying out the evolution of the internet
and the web, and the underlying technologies of finding and representing data online,
was just great. The discussion of HTML was particularly well put together and relevant
—and got to the heart of the fundamental problem of web archiving: What are we actu-
ally archiving? By directly engaging with the more technical side of the issues raised
by digital humanities, Milligan does a great deal to expose the extent to which tradi-
tional forms of research, archiving, and historical writing are just not fit for the purpose
and need immediate attention.
At the same time, what struck me repeatedly was the extent to which the underlying
nature of what “history” should look like remained unchallenged, while the idea of the
“archive” was similarly left to stand—the image of the archive as a repository of gov-
ernment/bureaucratic systems was left uninterrogated.3 I was also repeatedly struck by
the lack of attention to the mass privatization of the records of human life, which the
1
Ian Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research
(Montreal, 2019).
2
Ibid., 13–14.
3
For an alternative view of the “archive,” see, for example, J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “‘To
Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Archival Science, no. 19 (2019): 71–85.

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1340 AHR Review Roundtable

processes described have entailed. When the vast majority of the “archive” is in private
hands—used and abused for private profit—the nature of the historian’s relationships
with their sources is simply different.

Michelle Moravec: Milligan’s argument, posed as a problematic, is built around

very contemporary histories for the most part, and it is aimed at historians who would

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be using “massive born-digital” materials for their research, but it has fascinating impli-
cations for historians of a more distant past who use materials that have moved into the
digital realm, which he hints at in discussions of projects like the Old Bailey. This leads
me to ask whether we might extend his relatively innocuous claim that all historians of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries must consult digital archives to cover
historians who work on earlier eras. This gets us into some hotly contested terrain, but
it’s an area that is more widely applicable than his admittedly small group of historians
of the very recent past. When restricted to that group alone, I suspect the vast majority
of historians will simply dismiss his claims as irrelevant to their research. Like Tim, I
was most surprised by the unquestioning acceptance of “archive” as a concept, and of
sites like the Internet Archive as an “archive” rather than a digital repository. To be
fair, Milligan’s focus is on how the practice of the historian will have to change in these
sites, which he recognizes are not analogous to those created by professionally trained
archivists.

Daniel J. Story: Does everyone essentially agree with Milligan that the archived in-
ternet of the post-1994 era is and will continue to be an indispensable source base for
historians writing the history of this period? Would anyone want to offer a critique or a
qualification of that underlying claim?

Tim Hitchcock: The telephone replaced correspondence over the course of the twen-
tieth century—but history did not wither on the vine. Underlying the claim for the cen-
trality of the archive of the internet to the history of the last three decades is an assump-
tion that history itself is a form of truth claim that is aimed at uncovering a knowable
reality. My belief is that history is a powerful genre that is essentially driven by the
needs of the present. The archives of the nineteenth century were not created with the
objective of allowing queer histories, histories of the body, or histories of sexuality to
be written—and yet these are some of the ones we write. Milligan’s version of the rela-
tionship between the archive and history would leave us all writing histories from
above, the content of which is driven by the shape of the archive.4

Daniel J. Story: Milligan clearly aims for a balance between, on the one hand, practi-
cal explanations of both the ways the internet is put together and the ways that archiv-
ing it are being carried out, and, on the other, critical analysis of how these realities
could or should affect historians’ practices, whether in the way we research or in the
way we train new historians. Does this approach succeed? Who do you think will be
Milligan’s most likely readers? In what settings will the book be most useful?
4
The rise of fields such as “digital forensics” suggest that more is going on in this relationship than
Milligan allows. See Thorsten Ries and Gábor Palkó, eds., “Special Issue on Born-Digital Archives,” spe-
cial issue, International Journal of Digital Humanities, no. 1 (2019).

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 History’s Future in the Age of the Internet 1341

Jo Guldi: Milligan argues that the profession is marked by a mood of resistance to

quantitative learning, an attitude that has structured the recent history of the profession
and shaped another generation of scholars who are ill equipped to deal with the archives
he has surveyed. Indeed, the collection of born-digital archives, Milligan demonstrates,
has been shunted into a kind of underground space of unofficial conferences and blog
posts, such that the heroes of modern preservation have little to no track record in terms

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of major journal publications.
The first target Milligan names for reform is the organs of scholarly publication
themselves. Scholarly journals, Milligan shows, have become a holdout against new re-
search. “Methods are often cut from journal manuscripts or buried deep in footnotes,”
he argues.5 The most important conversations about the preservation of the internet in
historical archives, he explains, are “taking place outside the conventional published lit-
erature . . . on blogs, in library white papers, and other forms of grey literature.”6 By
pointing to the need for engagement in these conversations by traditional historians,
Milligan has revealed a pressing need for redirection on the part of the profession.
The second major target Milligan names is the departments of universities and uni-
versity tenure committees, committed to outdated norms of historical scholarship in a
way that ultimately harms the profession. Milligan shows how history departments, by
resisting quantitative measures, have become fortresses secured against the materials of
researching contemporary history. “In 2016–17, for example, there were 9 primarily
‘digital’ jobs in the American Historical Association’s Career Center—as opposed to
44 Asianists, 55 Europeanists, 26 Latin Americanists, 138 Americanists, or 35 global
scholars,” he remarks. Milligan also traces how departments have undermined engage-
ment in new research by clinging to old patterns of promotion based on single author-
ship. “The historical profession still does not properly reward multiple collaborators on
projects, and often does not have physical spaces on campuses to facilitate such
exchanges,” he writes. “Indeed, tenure standards—the definition of how we expect ju-
nior researchers to behave—largely adhere to the sole authored monograph as the gold
standard of scholarly achievement.”7

Tim Hitchcock: Milligan generally manages to escape the U.S.-centric world of digi-
tal humanities debates around tenure and hierarchy, and he offers a very interesting dis-
cussion on the differences between European, Australian, Canadian, and U.S.
approaches to archiving.8 This doesn’t quite work as well when discussing employment
and practice. And while he is very good on the need to promote people with technical
skills and new approaches, this section felt more like a plaint influenced by the genera-
tions of scholars struggling to navigate the system, rather than a consideration of how
and why the profession works the way it does. I rather missed a wider consideration of
the structures of authority that have led to the baleful outcome Milligan outlines.
In terms of audience, I would love to give this volume to the first-year group at the
University of Sussex, who currently get a twenty-two-lecture introduction to digital his-
5
Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 238.
6
Ibid., 25.
7
Ibid., 238–240.
8
For the development of national initiatives in digital archiving see Niels Brügger and Ditte Laursen,
eds., The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: The Case of National Web Domains (Abingdon, Ox-
fordshire, 2019).

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1342 AHR Review Roundtable

tory. The section on HTML could form the required reading for two of these lectures.
We also teach a second-year course on web archiving, for which this would be an im-
portant reading. It would also work well as an introductory text for the “digital-humanities
curious.”

Michelle Moravec: I believe proponents of the digital humanities will respond more

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positively to this book, and it will find a place in more digital humanities courses rather
than history courses. For historians, I believe the chapter that will strike the strongest
chord is the final one, although I think the GeoCities chapter and its discussion of ethics
are quite important for historians. The first chapter gives a good overview that would
be quite useful in an introduction to digital humanities or digital history course. I imag-
ine this book will find a spot on comprehensive exam reading lists for students who
wish to pursue digital approaches in their theses or dissertations.

Daniel J. Story: Milligan discusses historians’ changing relationship with librarians,

archivists, and archiving initiatives—most notably the Internet Archive—and the evolv-
ing tasks and challenges that librarians and archivists are increasingly tackling when it
comes to capturing and cataloguing the ever-increasing cascade of digital sources.
What do you think will be the most important dynamic—mentioned in the book, or
not—that this relationship will involve in the coming few decades that will be substan-
tively different from the past ways that historians and librarians or archivists interacted?
What are we seeing already, and what do you think still lies ahead?

Tim Hitchcock: The discussion of Facebook and Google as non-archiving institutions

and the global review of national domain archiving were nicely done—and the discussion
of the instance I know best (viz., the British Library) was spot on.9 At the same time, the
tensions between private sector for-profit archiving, private sector nonprofit archiving
(i.e., the Internet Archive), and state archiving are worth much more attention. We have
simply transformed the nature of the “archive”—privatized and given to a bunch of very
greedy people to monetize. There is a wider need to rethink copyright, individual privacy,
the right to be remembered, and the right not to have your life used for profit without
benefit to you. All these issues will determine the shape of the archive much more fully
than the skill set or tools gifted to the next generation of historians. As a profession we
have been remarkably uninterested in the literature generated in archival science and li-
brary science, where these issues are more directly discussed.

Michelle Moravec: The archival profession, rightly so, has been unhappy with both
the appropriation of the word “archive” to describe anything that stores material, and
the appropriation of the term “archivist” to describe someone without archival training
(never mind the incursion of history Ph.D.s into archival employment). Milligan amply
acknowledges that the lack of archivists’ labor in born-digital archives means that his-
torians will have to work differently. I wish there were a greater plea for attentiveness
to what archivists have written about the important issues that historians will need to
understand in order to do this different kind of work.
9
For the British experience, see Jane Winters, “Negotiating the Archives of UK Web Space,” in Brüg-
ger and Ditte Laursen, The Historical Web and Digital Humanities, 75–88.

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 History’s Future in the Age of the Internet 1343

On the one hand, digital humanities has led to greater collaboration between histori-
ans and archivists than I experienced in the late twentieth century, but on the other
hand, digital humanities has ramped up the stakes of those collaborations as job lines
and grants are tied into them. Thus, the relationship is often fraught. As someone who
organizes panels for historical conferences that contain archivists as presenters, it is of-
ten embarrassingly clear that historians are not in the audience, but archivists are. Digi-

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tal humanities projects do not always adequately acknowledge the contributions of
archivists. This acknowledgment should be part of an ethical research practice, but far
too many historians still consider archivists to be handmaidens (all gendered implica-
tions intended) of historians.

Daniel J. Story: In many respects, the book’s heart is Milligan’s extended explora-
tion of the GeoCities archive as a source base for historians (chap. 5). What about this
case study do you find most thought provoking? Problematic? And most importantly,
did you have a GeoCities site?

Jo Guldi: I spent a great deal of time on the internet in the early 1990s, but mostly on
Usenet sites rather than GeoCities.

Tim Hitchcock: I did not have a GeoCities site, and I spent this period (the early
1990s) teaching humanities computing to undergraduates—concentrating on hypertext
(using HyperCard) and database design, and writing educational CD-ROMS in a hyper-
text format.10 In other words, my journey into this material was rather different, so
while I found the community emphasis and discussion of the nature of GeoCities fun, it
did not really resonate.

Michelle Moravec: I did not have a GeoCities site, but listservs were a significant
component of my graduate school experience in the 1990s, specifically H-Net and
WMST-L, a women’s studies listserv. I fear the GeoCities chapter is where Milligan is
most likely to lose historians in this book, because most will simply dismiss this as not
“historical” given the bias in the profession against very recent history.

Daniel J. Story: One of the weightiest, and probably most intractable, topics Milligan
tackles is the ethics surrounding the use of users’ internet data for research purposes.
Should posts from a by-and-large obscure internet forum from the mid-1990s—a time
when it was less widely grasped how public and how permanent posting online would
become—be fair game, in all their specificity, for historians’ use? The difficulty be-
comes all the more apparent, Milligan notes, when one finds users discussing the most
sensitive of personal experiences. He offers an array of principles for navigating what
he readily admits is a challenge with no simple answers. Discerning “original user per-
ceptions of privacy” is surely an important but often daunting task.11 What struck you
10
One of the few accounts of the evolution of “digital history” that corresponds with my experience is
Adam Crymble, Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age (Champaign, Ill.,
forthcoming 2021).
11
Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 204.

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1344 AHR Review Roundtable

as most useful about Milligan’s approach on these ethical questions, and what perhaps
most deserves further interrogation?

Tim Hitchcock: The rise of ethics mirrors the collapse of regulation. What we need
are clearer policies on how data can be used rather than an ethical framework policed
by nothing more powerful than a university committee or an individual’s conscience.

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I am increasingly a fan of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation plan.12 I also
believe that personal privacy is less important than the “right to be remembered.” An
ethical approach privileges the emotional experience of the Global North, while a “right
to be remembered” draws attention to the colonial nature of historical writing in gener-
al—and to the problematic nature of writing based on born-digital material in particular.
Milligan offers helpful figures of web usage statistics—North and South—but doesn’t
take the next step in terms of the issue of ethical reflection on the exclusions entailed.

Michelle Moravec: This is a significant issue and one that archivists have dealt with
far more than historians. I have been unhappily surprised with most historians equating
“public” with “available for use.” Here Milligan’s work intersects with histories of all
periods as we grapple with the visibility created by digitizing archival materials. I think
chapter 5 is one that is of major importance for training historians in the digital age.
What does it mean to amplify the visibility of individuals, either living or dead? Of
course, this is not an issue relevant only to the digital realm (many an archive contains
materials in which the creator expresses a desire for privacy), but one that is scaled up
by the digital. The right to be forgotten and variations in privacy and libel laws across
jurisdictions are all subjects that the twenty-first-century historian needs greater training
about and attentiveness to. We cannot simply default to “online” as implying that mate-
rials are ethically available for our use.

Daniel J. Story: Milligan helpfully acknowledges that, when it comes to high-level

digital research skills, such scholarly undertakings will most often be a team effort—not
everyone can or should major in every area of digital scholarship. But the book does
put forward a fairly ambitious call for broad swaths of historians going forward to en-
gage with the kinds of skills and critical questions necessary for tackling the increas-
ingly digital source base we have before us. What did you take away from Milligan’s
more practical suggestions for training historians? Where do you think the weight of
our focus should lie, whether in teaching specific digital skills or in developing a wider
array of accessible tools? Are there a few core tenants that every history department
should consider embracing when it comes to digital engagement?

Jo Guldi: In part, History in the Age of Abundance? represents a detailed manual for
rethinking the historical discipline to train new scholars to deal with the new formats of
born-electric text, their preservation, and their scale. The book persuasively argues
about the futility of any post-1977 project that attempts to analyze political events after
this date—whether born from below or from above—through traditional means, such
12
See “The History of the General Data Protection Regulation,” European Data Protection Supervisor,
accessed August 1, 2020, https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/legislation/history-general-
data-protection-regulation_en.

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 History’s Future in the Age of the Internet 1345

as reading an individual archive or following biography. That is not to say that biogra-
phy and the individual archive no longer have a place; rather, what those forms of his-
tory cannot lay a claim to, Milligan asserts, is a mastery of the context of multiple
exchanges, email memos, newspapers, and the voices of ordinary people, which are
captured only in extant archives of electronic discussions of this period.
Milligan’s solutions to the problem of the ordinary history department are several,

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and they are both precise and well within the reach of the profession. He points con-
structively to websites, the exercises in code, and everything else an ordinary depart-
ment of history—one without any faculty who have been trained in these matters—
would need in order to shape its curriculum around the methods of historical research
with digitized archives. With the help of a university’s librarians and other staff, the
exercises he points to in the Programming Historian website could be added to any
“methods” syllabus in a graduate program, even supervised by faculty who themselves
are trained in questions of critical inquiry rather than code.

Tim Hitchcock: The skills, sites, and approaches Milligan suggests are fine—but in-
sufficient; and also inappropriately focused on the employed history profession. The
overwhelming majority of history students do not go on to become historians—and
those that do should be smart enough to figure out how to both collaborate and learn
the skills they need. Arguing over the training required for this small minority takes at-
tention away from what university history teaching needs to do. There are just a few
models of what an undergraduate history curriculum should look like, and we need to
concentrate on how to build digital critical skills at this level. Through most of the post-
war period in the UK, history and classics were seen as the best form of training and edu-
cation for the civil service, administration, and the professions—and this was true be-
cause these subjects made students experts at finding and analyzing information,
ordering it to make a compelling argument, and using that argument to create change in
the world.13 Our undergraduates still need to be able to do these things, and do them in
a way that is at least critically aware of where information is located, how to find it, and
why it is inherently wrong. Milligan lays out a series of tools and approaches that, if
taught well, would achieve all these ends—but our attention needs to be directed at a
different, and undergraduate, audience.
As a final comment, I wondered about the lack of discussion of forms of publishing
(a different book I know!). The plethora of new volumes being produced in digital hu-
manities that take the form of brick-like books with no associated web resources, feels
like a departure. Hypertext is decades old; interactive relationships between data and
text are created every time we fill in an online form; and our ability to find and use
images—and sound and video—has changed out of all recognition. And yet, I find my-
self being sent hardbacks and paperbacks—with the notes at the end, and with the au-
thorial authority built in to the oldest of old-fashioned texts. If the archive of the born
digital is set to transform history, it is just a surprise that it has yet to transform how his-
tory is published.
13
See Peter Mandler, “Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, 2014: The Two Cultures Revisited; The Humani-
ties in British Universities since 1945,” Twentieth Century British History 26, no. 3 (2015): 400–423.

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1346 AHR Review Roundtable

Michelle Moravec: Given the ever-changing means for engaging digital materials, I
don’t believe it is possible to lay out a prescriptive plan for transforming historical
training as much as I know the profession wants one. What is necessary is training stu-
dents broadly in the approaches that a—dare I invoke the hackneyed phrase—“lifelong
learner” in history would need to have to utilize these sources. Fundamentally, histori-
ans make arguments based on stuff we call evidence. That evidence could be digital is

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the point of Milligan’s book. If we accept that premise, then historians, both profes-
sional ones and those who seek employment elsewhere, will have to be able to train
themselves, for the most part, in the “latest” means for finding or analyzing digital evi-
dence. Milligan’s argument for incorporating the Programming Historian is a solid one,
and one that I hope is taken up by more history departments at the undergraduate level.
There is a fetishization of coding that makes many historians believe they can’t do it,
when in fact they could do a great deal more than they believe. A historian doesn’t
need to write original code, but they might want to know what code can do (and is do-
ing) and be able to use someone else’s code.
Footnotes

Daniel J. Story is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of California,

Santa Cruz. He serves as Consulting Editor for the American Historical Review
and produces the journal’s podcast, AHR Interview. He is currently working on a
history of the American advertising industry’s use of consumer data and on a docu-
mentary podcast on the experience and memory of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake
in Santa Cruz County, California. He received his Ph.D. in History from Indiana
University Bloomington in 2019.

Jo Guldi is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, for-

mer Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, author of Roads to Power
(Harvard University Press, 2010), and coauthor, with David Armitage, of The His-
tory Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is currently principal in-
vestigator of a $1 million NSF grant supporting digital research into the longue-
durée history of unaffordable rent. She has authored many recent articles on digi-
tal methods, especially “Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in
Large-Scale Textual Corpora” in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Her book on
the history of global land reform movements since 1881 will appear from Yale in
2021.

Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex and Di-
rector of the Sussex Humanities Lab. He has published widely on the histories of
poverty, gender, and crime, and with Robert Shoemaker (and others) is responsi-
ble for the creation of a series of web resources facilitating the writing of “history
from below,” including the Old Bailey Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org). He is
currently working on surviving a global pandemic.

Michelle Moravec is Associate Professor of History at Rosemont College in Phila-

delphia, Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 2004. Her most recent digital
history publication is “Bestsellers and the Birth of Popular Feminism,” forthcoming
in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. She is currently working on a digital history of
1970s feminism.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020