The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

Abstract

The transnational turn has been happening simultaneously with the digital turn and the implications of this entanglement are profound, although as yet largely undiscussed. The great bulk of methodological discussions of "history in a digital age" have so far centered on approaches that harness computational tools to reveal patterns in large sets of textual or mixed sources-emerging techniques of "text--mining" and "distant reading." 2 But more pervasive shifts brought by the internet age are working a much broader impact on what historians do and how. Only a tiny fraction of us are tackling "big data" with quantitative tools. Vastly more of us use the search functions of Google, Google Books, JSTOR, digitized newspaper databases, Ancestry dot com, and the like as we track down qualitative information on particular topics, people, places, or eras. 3 1 I am very grateful to Julie Greene, Diana Paton, Christian De Vito, and Laura Edwards