Adam Crymble – Technology & the Historian

Book Cover - Technology and the Historian, showing painting of two eighteenth century men overlooking a valley, making plans to survey and develop the land. — Cover of ‘Technology and the Historian by Adam Crymble’

This book, Technology & the Historian (2021) charts the changes historians have witnessed their field undergo during the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive—all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology’s role in the field’s development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars. Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together.

This book explodes many of the foundation myths upon which digital history has been built and replaces them with a clear-eyed account that melds historiography, technology, and pedagogy. In beautiful prose, Crymble has identified the streams of influence that have shaped the field – Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex

Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era [Buy Now].

Dr Adam Crymble is a digital humanities scholar at University College London, and deputy director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. He is the Chair of ProgHist, publishing the multilingual Programming Historian.