This area concerns the broader methodological questions that arise when digital tools are brought to bear on historical sources and questions. Where the previous research area focuses on building infrastructure for cultural heritage institutions, this one focuses on thinking through what digital methods do to historical knowledge — their possibilities, their blind spots, and their consequences for the scholarly community.
My contribution operates primarily at the synthetic and diagnostic level. I have co-authored two State of the Field articles: one on digital history as a whole, published in History (2020), and one on digital legal history specifically, published in the Journal for Digital Legal History (2024). Both ask not only what has been done, but what the field’s principal methodological tensions and unresolved questions are — concerning reproducibility, source selection, the politics of digitisation, and the relationship between computational and interpretive approaches.
Beyond these overviews, this work manifests in teaching (the Introduction to Digital Humanities and Social Analytics course at the VU Amsterdam, 2022–2024), in peer review for DSH, IJDH, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, and in my involvement in the DHBenelux and DHNB communities.
I write about these matters for History, DSH, and DHBenelux.