Grounding Digital History in the History of Computing

William J. Turkel, Shezan Muhammedi, and Mary Beth Start from the Western University, Canada, propose that digital history should be grounded in the history of computing. According to them, future historians will find many contemporary phenomena to be impossible to understand without at least some background in the history of computing. In some cases, such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the sheer scope of the available material will require the use of sophisticated mining, machine learning, and visualization. Some subjects, such as zero day exploits, botnets, wiretapping, the deep Web, will present challenges both in terms of access and the degree of technical expertise required to assess them. In the meantime, what the growing field of digital history really needs is a new introductory text that teaches historians and other humanists some computational methods in historical context.