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Visiting a reading room in the last five years is a very different experience than what it looked like even fifteen years ago: while a few researchers carefully read archival documents in situ, most are crouched over their archival documents with a smartphone or digital camera in hand, taking thousands of photos that will be analyzed upon return to their home institutions. With the advent of digital photography and less-restrictive archival policies on digital reproduction for personal use, historical research is now characterized by quick trips to gather thousands of photos. What does this mean for the research and writing of history, however? How do researchers create their corpuses and on what information? What work takes place before the archival visit, after the archival visit, and how can we better support this sort of work? Drawing on a 2019 survey of 253 historians employed at Canadian universities, this article argues that through specific reference to the use of digital archival photography, we can see the varied ways in which historical work is being adapted to these new and emerging technological circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courses on digital history methods are being offered at more Canadian universities than ever before, with both techniques and tools being embedded in courses on oral history, environmental history, and public history, to name a few. What is being taught in these classrooms and who is teaching it? Despite a wealth of digital, historical scholarship being undertaken by women, this article shows that the majority of these classes are taught by men and, furthermore, men have also authored the majority of texts and articles typically assigned in this field. Suggestions for rewiring the digital history classroom to be a more inclusive environment are made, including looking to projects in the related fields of oral, queer, and literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians began using computers in the 1950s and 1960s when their possibilities seemed unlimited in the private, public, and non-profit sectors of wealthier countries. In this societal context, Clio met computers. In the following decades, a few historians would predict, from time to time, that digitally-enabled scholarship was on track to become the disciplinary norm. They emphasized the impact of specific initiatives enabled by changing technologies, from the mainframe era to microcomputers, the web, the tsunami of "born-digital" and digitized data, mobile devices, and new computational approaches such as machine learning. However, their predictions routinely failed to materialize and, while all historians might use digital tools at least to some extent, a claim that "we-are-all-digital-now" downplays substantive questions about History's past and current relationship with new technologies. This article re-interprets the changing meaning of digital technologies within the disciplinary culture and institutional conditions of History. The evidence thus far reveals good reasons for both optimism and pessimism about digitally-enabled History at various times since the 1950s. By examining the complex and often surprising past and present, we can better determine and take the needed next steps in Digital History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It all seems so orderly and comprehensive. Instead of firing up the microfilm reader to navigate the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star, one needs only to log into online newspaper databases. A keyword search, for a particular event, person, or cultural phenomenon, brings up a list of research findings. Previously impossible research projects can now be attempted. This process has fundamentally reshaped Canadian historical scholarship. We can see this in Canadian history dissertations. In 1998, a year with 67 dissertations, the Toronto Star was cited 74 times. However it was cited 753 times in 2010, a year with 69 dissertations. Similar data appears in the Canadian Historical Review (CHR), a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. Databases are skewing our research. We are witnessing the application of commercial Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology - originally and primarily designed for the efficient digitization of large reams of corporate and legal documents, conventionally formatted - to historical sources. The results are, unsurprisingly, a mixed bag. In this article, I make two arguments. Firstly, online historical databases have profoundly shaped Canadian historiography. In a shift that is rarely - if ever - made explicit, Canadian historians have profoundly reacted to the availability of online databases. Secondly, historians need to understand how OCR works, in order to bring a level of methodological rigor to their work that use these sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]