Are digital archives helping? Yes the internet archive and other online digital libraries are providing me with masses of early 19th c. material for a historical project I am working on. Improvements? First much better quality scanning. Early Google scans are particularly bad eg thumbs appearing on the pages obscuring text, maps and plans not unfolded and separately scanned, bad pages not rescanned when out of focus. Some national arrchives show how good scans can be. Second, much clearer information on IPR although this goes much further than the archives and is due to unclear legal situation in many countries for example the question of whether a photo of a painting is separately copyrighted where US and UK law appears to be different! My project also concerns exploring how IT can support the analysis of documents which I generally feel has been well behind numerical applications.

To Geoffrey Stephenson: Thank you for sharing your project information. My experiences is with Google scans is that I prefer to track down the original document containing images. If you see the image in Google images, most likely you would need to identify the source and go there to get a larger image. Even so -- as you point out -- the is a copyright issue surrounded by a great diversity of sometimes conflicting laws. Some of these laws may prevent archives from publishing full-resolution images and compromise between open access and low resolution. So, Google is not the only one to publish such images. Another issue is the Public Domain. What is understood to be in Public Domain differs in the US and UK from other countries' laws.

Analysis of documents: do you mean textual analysis similar to what the Text Encoding Initiative is working on? Great discussion and thanks!

I haven't followed the TEI since it was first set up. I think that it is rather more literary than I am thinking of. For example I am using CATMA (which I found on another RG discussion) for coding text to help generate timelines for individuals in the Guerra de Indeprndencia from thousands of pages of contenporary documents. I am interested in tools for that level of analysis. It would be nice to be able to ask a corpus where X was from Jan to Aug 1809 and show it on a map. This is the sort of thing that is easy with numeric data such as correlations between variables from surveys expressed as colour coding on maps. Textual analysis is way behind.

Thank you! I have not heard of CATMA, but it looks like I should know more about it. I have used JSON for timelines. TEI is ideal for literary scholars as well as for the analysis of historical texts. Have you used HistoryPin? It has maps as well as a timeline. Thanks for pointing me to CATMA!

I haven't used HistoryPin. Looking quickly at it it seems to be an online tool and I am mainly interested in offline tools for publication. I have used Map Creator 2 for animated timelines although I recently found one can animate maps with Powerpoint.

Thanks. I have to look into Map Creator. I have used an offline product ArcGIS (there is also QGIS ans open source version), but I do not recall seeing a timeline feature. Do you plan to upload your data to an online platform some day?

Map creator enables you to draw animated tracks on maps with attached pictures. It includes maps and gazeteer. Clearly you can create timelines of movements eg voyage or events on the map. It outputs .swf or .avi files. It is intended I think for records of holidays but can be used for anything. There is a free version with watermarks. I am primarily concerned with event sequences and movements eg spread of insurrections. I hope to publish in some form.

Thank you very much. I'll give this a try next month when things calm down here just a little bit.

To Florence Zufferey. Thank you for your very detailed reply. The ecodices database appears to be very comprehensive. Does it provide adequate detail for you to analyse and interpret? Does it allow you to add information or correct the information? In 1994, I worked on Relics, but it was only bibliographical data, using ProCite for DOS: I still had a computer running on DOS, but it died an honorable death on my desk in 2002. I have also used File Maker Pro in 1997 when working on a Folklore database but quickly switched to Microsoft Access. I use Endnotes but more and more people use Zotero and Mendelay. I see the relationship of historiography and digital technology gradually evolving as a growing body of historical materials may be available in digital format. Still, historical study and analysis does not revolve around technology unless it is the history of technology itself that you choose to study. Technology plays a great role in enhancing the methods you can use. Great topic!

To Ian Welch. Thanks you for sharing your research topic! Since Google is harvesting the images from source sites like museums, archives, libraries, or historical societies, these institutions should be able to verify the authenticity of the digital reproduction of original documents.

Question 1: when we use an original publication, what is of primary interest: the information in the publication or the medium of the publication itself? Archivists consider the intrinsic value of the book (method of printing, features, references, etc.) often just as important as the information they contain.

Question 2: If you were to rely on digital reproductions, what would be your criteria for trusting digital copies (PDF/A format promoted for archival purposes)? Perhaps a statement of verification from the archives publishing the PDF file? Such a statement would attest to having the document inspected for authenticity by an archivist as well as a scholar in the discipline related to the document.

To Florence Zufferey: I also agree that none of the scholarly work should revolve around what technology offers. Companies develop software and then dump it, expecting the rest of the world to follow them. At some point, however, there may be a critical mass of born-digital content that will require archives to preserve the medium and the technology that created it.

No doubt the technology has changed the research Methods, but the methodology remained Same/Similar. Digitalisation of books, journals, & software development have improved the speed & quality of research.

I personally feel that the question should be "Digital technology and research methods" please correct me if ......

To Parag Narkhede: Thank you very much! I have changed the discussion title to methods although technology will change methods as well as the discourse around methods, hence I used methodology. 'Methods' may define the scope of this particular discussion more precisely, so I am glad you raised that question.

My question was particularly related to the use of digital content in the Humanities where born-digital content and related data (e.g., geographical coordinates) may add new dimensions in research methods. Even in the traditional methods, there was a great difference (and some overlap) between how humanities and social science researchers processed or interpreted data.

Perhaps the question also needs to be revised to ask about how digital data may be interpreted, archived, and retrieved.

To Caterina Giannottu: Thank you. There is no doubt that human intelligence will never be replaced in history and the humanities since a great deal depends on analysis, interpretation, historical representation. Digital technology has yet to mature to interpreting a shape file as a part of an art work, its cultural context, and stylistic period on which even humans disagree...imagine computers arguing among themselves about historical periods :-)))...not impossible.

Where I see technology to play a greater role, is the analysis and interpretation of born-digital data coming from photo-mapped Instagram images of current events of historic magnitude. Another evidence is the use of Twitter in the various uprisings throughout North Africa. That is where historians will need to come face-to-face with data, oral histories, digital maps (from GPS data), etc.

What will historians of the future demand of archives to preserve?

I was referring to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunis where there are millions of Twitter data to analyze. We study revolutions in Europe (no facebook postings, tweets, or GPS data), but this is very similar in scale and impact. The complete study of these events may not even be possible without such data.

To me, the impact is unprecendent. Event sampling is not possible without using mobile devices. In one grant project, my coauthors and I collected data for ER patients for 30 days, 3 times per day randomly. The amount of data and the manner of data collection allowed us to measure negative affect levels right before smoking relapse. In other I/O psych research project, my other colleagues and I dealt with test data from 500K+ job applicants, which is also impossible without using digital technology. Also, in data analysis, we see many techniques heavily depending on computing power, such as multiple imputations, bootstrapping, (SEM? already an old story). In all areas of research including data collection, data analysis, theory building, etc., I see huge impact of technology.