What have I learned from this experience as a historian or working in digital public humanities?
All subsections of historians have their niche and have a hard time expanding their audience. Whether it is expanding their research or breaking away from the common perspective on a subject, it can create gatekeeping and lack of voices in the field. Perspectives on intersections such as race, LGBTQIA+, gender, class, and more tend to be left out due to some of the older common place methodologies in the field of history. Read more on this in Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities by Roopika Risam
My experience and thoughts
In this internship, I noticed that we historians are attempting to move away from accepting previously accepted “truths” to question and analyze more. In the maps that I created, the goal was to understand murder versus “other” deaths in 1700-1705 London and the relationship between the death in that part of the city. The maps showed that the city of London did follow socio-economic norms of cities. Some may call this a waste of time, but what if? What if the cities had abnormal behaviors like murder common in a rural area? That would opened up its own can of worms that we would have never thought about. Again, niche I know, but isn’t that all of history? We always say that history tends to repeat itself and if we don’t care to learn the truth about what really happened, how can we prevent it from happening again?
How other projects address this issue
I find this an important discussion of how I hope DH grows in the future, because it was seen a bit in the infancy of the field, but became a little lost. Roy Rosenzweig discussed that Clio and the future of DH being a tool for historians to extend the field far beyond what Roy knew at the time. He truly had a vision of what Clio Wired meant and could mean in the future. However the 2000s became a little to comfortable with DH simply meaning digitization of historical items.
Then the that middle years of DH finally gave a push to the field. Take the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project. It shows just how influential and connected Bacon was to others in a more technical form. Without that DH networking, historians may not have understood how much of an effect Bacon had on society. There is at least a statistical chance (as per the legend) that Bacon had influence on Queen Elizabeth I, King James I and VI, and more.
Final thoughts and feelings
I wanted my internship to follow this investigative and analytical train of thought a bit. To take what we know about a topic and ask if those facts are actually true. In my case, is was true and that is great. My maps add evidence the the already solid argument that cities and crime follow specific socio-economic norms. Bringing new perspectives to the field of history (digital and traditional) is vital to me and many historians as we move forward. Perspective is everything to a situation, whether is it 1500 or 2023.