Modes of Historical Analysis: Digital Approaches to Global and Imperial History

Booking not required, members of Oxford University only

Digital History has a relatively long lineage, reaching back to the middle of the twentieth century, but significantly more work is needed to integrate it into the theory, method, and philosophy of History. This talk will provide an overview of prominent digital history projects in an effort to explain how imperial and global history could benefit from and contribute to such an undertaking. My central claim - or provocation - is that contemporary digital history forces us to confront issues in historical theory and method not widely discussed since the 1960s, in debates about historical determinism undertaken by the likes of Thomas Nagel and Isaiah Berlin. National, trans-national, trans-continental, and global digital history projects confront us with foundational questions about whether History is (or should be) a nomothetic, ideographic or (perhaps now) probabilistic discipline, creating epistemological and methodological as well as technical issues. The potential for the development of digital imperial and global history is profound, but complicated by a fascinating range of problems that require both experimentation and substantial infrastructural investment.

James Smithies is Professor of Digital Humanities at King's College London and former head of the King's Digital Lab.