ARTICLE: Jo GULDI, "The Revolution in Text Mining for Historical Analysis is Here" (The American Historical Review CXXIX (2024), No. 2 (June), 519-543

 

(image source: OUP)

Abstract:

We have known since Vico to think of written text and oral traditions as two systems of culture. Social historians have long treated the rise of literacy itself as an important index of modernity, although collectors of oral traditions have typically transcribed folk songs and oral stories into text. Modern historians track the appearance of different genres of writing, from parliamentary blue books to the newspaper to the novel to published transcripts of court cases, as an index of evolving institutions and markets. And knowledge of the way that these texts circulated—whether read aloud in the post office or debated on bulletin board systems on the early internet—is often a clue to important social structures. The knowledge accessible through text does not exhaust in any way the full repository of artifacts that historians use—which of course extends to the formats of texts; to visual and audio media, which may or may not combine graphics, video, or sound with text; to the record of the built and natural environment itself; and to demographic, price, and climate data sometimes measured in nontextual ways and stored in separate repositories. Despite innovation and a plurality of possible concerns, many of our points of entry into the past remain through text.

Read more here: DOI 10.1093/ahr/rhae163.