Trading Zones of Digital History

What role computers can play in historical research is continuously debated. The different facets of digital research, such as computer technology, data management and historical inquiry, call for collaborations across disciplines. Historians collaborate with experts from computational domains to negotiate how historical questions may be approached using digital means. Yet how digital methods affect practices of historical research is underexplored. The question underlying this book is therefore: how are historians affected by interactions with computational experts in the context of digital history collaborations?

Through a multi-sited ethnographic approach, Kemman investigates how historians interact with computational experts, what possible power asymmetries manifest, and how historians change or adopt new practices as a result. Kemman critically examines these collaborations as ‘trading zones’, expanding the framework to facilitate comparative research between multiple collaborations.

This book is of interest to scholars interested in digital history and its relation to the historical discipline and to digital humanities, as well as scholars interested in studying digital history as a case of interdisciplinarity.