History in the Age of Abundance?

Ian Milligan is associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo.

"A foundational study written with impressive clarity, History in the Age of Abundance? provides effective guidance on how we might approach the archived web as a historical source and represents a clarion call to rethinking history training." Steven High, Concordia University and editor of Occupied St. John's: A Social History of a City at War, 1939-1945 "This is an important, indeed necessary book, which promises to set the agenda for historical research in the next decade. Milligan challenges historians to reflect on their theory and practice so that they can begin to adapt to a research environment characterised not by the scarcity of primary sources but by quantities of data too vast for any human to read. Crucially, the book does not just pose questions, but sets out a pathway for historians to work more collaboratively, to develop the skills to work at scale, and to place ethics at the heart of the research process. As one of the few historians who has engaged with large-scale web and social media archives, Milligan is ideally placed to chart a way through the pitfalls of practising history in an age of abundance. He demonstrates why historians should step up and participate fully in conversations about the creation, presentation, use and preservation of digital sources, and what they stand to lose if they do not. This book is essential reading not just for the skilled digital researcher, but for anyone who has ever used a digital library catalogue." Jane Winters, University of London "The entire context of historical scholarship is changing, and historians are not ready. This is not just an issue for those who study the most recent 30 years of history but a concern for all historians. As a discipline we have little handle on dealing with either the bounty of born-digital sources, nor do we understand the algorithms that drive much discovery in digital and digitized sources. The further we get from the inception of the World Wide Web in 1991 the more of a problem this becomes. With this important book, Milligan does historians now and in the future a vital service. Part history of the internet, part practical guide to how to manage the vastness of sources from the web, History in the Age of Abundance is a must read for all historians as digital historical records become ever more present. The future of the past is in jeopardy, and Milligan's book will help historians defend against the coming digital dark age." Seth Denbo, American Historical Association"Never has recorded history been so vast and the sources -- from governments, organizations, and individuals -- so varied. These records can both illuminate and obscure. No one is sure how big the web is, but it is too big to be saved in its entirety or to be closely read, one document at a time. So Milligan offers historians something of a handbook, showing how they might change their techniques and, perhaps, ask new questions of the record." Literary Review of Canada "Taken together, the practical and conceptual issues Milligan covers serve as a kind of primer on the emerging landscape of internet archiving and, perhaps, as a handbook for historians moving into that realm of research. For Milligan, there are compelling reasons to think this will form a substantial and increasing share of historians' work in the decades to come." The American Historical Review "Milligan's book rejects the most positivist claims advocated by ardent cliometricians and digital humanities. He does not believe quantity trumps quality. More of something does not inevitably mean it is more true. The timeline of the past does not flow along a bell curve. There is not just vastly more stuff when we examine websites and web pages as historical artifacts; they are also fundamentally different in their qualities as artifacts. Their constitutive elements, their very ontologies, are different; so too, the way we access them is different. Therefore, convincing arguments about them will have to move along different lines of logic, correlation, connection, and causation." Society for US Intellectual History Journal