No one can deny the rapid progress of information technology over the last few decades.  We have seen these changes in all aspects of our lives, from the workplace, to consumerism, and transportation.  These changes have had major implications on historicism as well.  Cameron Blevins provides an explanation about the production of space and place in America during the late nineteenth century in “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston.”  Similarly, Matthew Wilkens’ article, “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction,” details how he was able to use documents in the nineteenth century to draw an imaginative geography of America.  So how have these modernized changes, discussed in these two articles, affected the capabilities of researching and documentation of history?  This analysis will discuss the various improvements in historical research from the use of digital research methods and also the potential shortcomings.

Digital research tools and methods have become more sophisticated and effective.  These tools can now review thousands of documents, what may take humans years, in a matter of seconds.  Of course, the evolution of digital research methods is not a means to replace actual human review.  Computations do not perform the research for people, but are instead a method for increasing the efficiency of the research through “distant reading.”

Blevins used the Houston Daily Post and a custom computer program to count how many times American cities were mentioned from 1894 to 1901.  From the data provided by the program, Blevins visually mapped the data intended to reflect the political and cultural atmosphere in America.  This imagined geography showed a number of trends in the nation including New York City’s dominance in Northeast affairs and Chicago’s importance in the Midwest.  This distant reading was supposed to support Blevin’s research since he could not possibly review all the editions of the Houston Daily Post.  If a person were conducting research on the Spanish American War in the New York Times, digital research could help him find every instance the war was mentioned in the newspaper.  As Blevins states, “digital technology presents both an opportunity and a challenge.”  Of course, Houston’s local newspaper would make a greater number of references to Houston and other cities in Texas.  A researcher cannot make generalizing assumptions about the political, cultural, and economic atmosphere simply based on distant reading because of the biases and the overwhelming regional focus.  Computation and statistics are just a few aspects of digital research, and should not be used exclusively.  It is an effective and powerful tool when massive amounts of data need to be analyzed.  The distant reading should supplement, not supplant, the close reading.

Wilkens’ use of digital research similarly mapped the major cities that were mentioned in major books and publications around the Civil War Era.  The amount of documents about or produced by New York dwarfed any other state.  This projected the imaginative prominence of the Northeast region with regards to culture, commerce, and politics, which indeed was important.  The map also reflected trends such as rapid urbanization in New England.  Another shortcoming of digital research was the over-emphasis on the Northeast and underrepresentation of other states especially in the Midwest.  This lopsided representation skews the importance of more populous states while downplaying less populous states.  Robert Nelson, the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, performed a similar experiment by mining the Richmond Times Dispatch.  His program analyzed over 24 million words from November 1860 to December 1865.  Through statistical modeling, Nelson tracked prevalent topics during the period including secession, fugitive slaves, and entertainment and culture.  Nelson states that “conventional historical methods would involve skimming much and closely reading a small sampling of articles” and that distant reading allows readers to “look at larger patterns among all the documents.”

Although digital research methods are powerful tools for supplementing traditional history research, it should not be the sole tool to rely on.  Distant reading tools allow users to quickly browse through a wide breadth of information and map ever-changing social relations; however, it cannot replace close reading.  We gain comprehensiveness, but lose context and quality.  These tools are intended to bolster the efficacy of research.  As technology continues to improve so too will research methods and visualization tools.