Tara Andrews


Username: tla
Website:
Biography: I'm a Byzantine historian who used to program computers for a living. I'm always looking for ways to program myself into more effective research. Currently I am working on an analysis of statistical methods for recovering manuscript stemmata (that is, 'family tree' relationships of which manuscripts were copied from which others.)

Tara Andrews's Blog posts

Digital history

Monday, July 5th, 2010

As a historian who can very easily be mistaken for a philologist, I have recently been pondering the question of what technology can do for the field of history.  Digital tools have proven themselves in quite a few surrounding fields – archaeology, philology, text criticism and analysis.  But can we also use computers to help us put all this disparate data together?  Can we use computers to help us keep track of historical reasoning?  Are there any useful formal models that could be made for historical research?

If so, how do we do it?  If not, must history itself be excluded from the ‘digital humanities’?