This area concerns the intellectual questions that arise when digital tools are brought to bear on historical problems — not the tools themselves, which belong to the infrastructure area, but the methodological and epistemological implications of using them.
The animating question is one I find worth stating plainly: what does it mean to do historical scholarship when digital systems sit between scholars and their sources, making decisions about segmentation, transcription, subject indexing, and eventually summarisation? These decisions are not neutral. They embed assumptions about what constitutes a document, a topic, a period, a language — assumptions that historians have spent generations interrogating, and which computational systems risk reintroducing uncritically at scale.
My contribution to this conversation has operated at two levels. Synthetic and diagnostic: the two State of the Field articles — on digital history (published in History, 2020, with eight co-authors) and on digital legal history (published in the Journal for Digital Legal History, 2024) — survey what has been done and, more importantly, identify the methodological tensions and blind spots that the field has not yet resolved. Analytical and critical: work on the classification of normative texts as an analytical choice (RHONDA), on automatic subject indexing as a scholarly problem rather than a technical convenience (HISMET), and on the status of ATR-generated transcriptions in research and archival contexts — the question of when a machine-generated transcription is good enough, and good enough for whom.
I write about these questions for History, DSH, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and present regularly at DHBenelux, DHNB, and DH conferences.