An observation and some history about the digitization of the past and historical research. When I started my dissertation research in late 1994 there was basically nothing available online for any serious historical research. Some folks had done some good stuff putting ...
2/ a few records online. But the odds of those being relevant to any original research you were doing was basically nil. Most of my research was done and my work on the dissertation had slowed to a crawl by 98/99 as I was trying to break into journalism. When I focused on ...
3/ finishing it up in late 2002 things had already changed dramatically. For me the big thing then was that if you had a university account a huge amount of a academic journals had been digitized. That's not for original research per se but it's an absolutely critical ...
4/ part of conducting original research. Now almost thirty years later it's like a world transformed. Certainly for Early America there are many core records which were edited and published in book form as far back as the early 19th century. Here I'm thinking of the ...
5/ core public records from 17th century New England. I don't know specifically whether those have been digitized by now. Seems quite possible since they're already in print and thus rendered in scannable text. And the quantity of material isn't that extensive.
6/ It's interesting, mortifying to think of how it would have changed my own research because a big chunk of my work was reading through these records looking for examples of and inferable references to something the original compilers were entirely uninterested in: ...
7/ examples of labor service by New England Indians to English settlers. Secondarily also trade relationships and intercommunal violence. If those are digitized, work that took me many months could likely be banged out in a few weeks with well planned keyword searches ...
8/ maybe not entirely, since spelling remained significantly irregular. But still. Even thirty years ago there was a wealth of records that had been microfiched by the Mormon Church - a huge resourced that countless historians have benefited from. Those are all readily ...
9/ digitizable even if only as images rather than text. Recently, I'd been knocking around the idea of doing a history podcast. So I tried to see if I could pull together more information that'd been able to in the mid-90s about a story that made a cameo in my ...
10/ Phd disseration and which has stuck in my head ever since: a shipload of Algonquian Indians who'd been rounded up and shipped off as slaves in the initial weeks of a gruesome conflict the colonists called "King Philip's War." At this point, many had been shipped out ...
11/ and the market for slaves had been glutted, along with some resistance to purchasing these war captives. The ship captain tried a lot of places but couldn't find buyers so he eventually dumped them off in Tangier, in North Africa. But the story doesn't end there.
12/ These were mainly "Praying Indians" who a colonist named John Eliot had Christianized and taught to read and write. Almost a decade later they managed to get a letter back to Eliot pleading for help. Tangier had been an English possession since 1661. But it had proved ...
13/ too costly to hold in the face of Moroccan attacks and blockades. So they in the early 1680s they were in the process of abandoning the city. Some remnant of these captives were still there trying to get back to New England. Eliot wrote to Robert Boyle in England to ...
14/ try to intercede on their behalf. There, in my 90s research, the trail ran cold. I didn't have the time or the patience at this point to do any new archival research. But access to virtually every journal article ever written and searchable even across different ...
15/ subject domains turned up significant new information. Some of which had already been published by the mid-90s, some since. In any case, the digitization of the historical past is a fascinating and hugely valuable endeavor, liberating layers of the past from ...
16/ single geographical locations or limited geographical locations, opening them up to being searched and scanned (in some cases) in more efficient ways and perhaps most importantly preserved. Even a few days of poking around exposed a wealth of new information that ...
17/ was almost entirely inaccessible to me 25 years earlier.
