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A Bird’s-Eye View of the Past: Digital History, Distant Reading and Sport History
Abstract
Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representations of these practices. This paper investigates the utility of distant reading as a research tool via three newspaper case studies concerning Muhammad Ali, women’s surfing in Australia, and homophobic language and Australian sport. The research reveals that the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of distant reading is dependent on numerous factors. While valuable in many instances, distant reading is rarely an end in itself and can be most powerful when paired with the traditional historical skills of close reading.
... This involves using digital technology and online resources to collect, organize, and analyze historical data, as well as digitally present historical findings and narratives [43]. Digital history involves using computer technology, software, digital databases, the internet, and other digital tools to gain new insights about history [44]. This approach allows historians and researchers to take advantage of the speed and computational capacity to analyze data more efficiently, identify patterns and trends, and correlate information from multiple sources [44]. ...
... Digital history involves using computer technology, software, digital databases, the internet, and other digital tools to gain new insights about history [44]. This approach allows historians and researchers to take advantage of the speed and computational capacity to analyze data more efficiently, identify patterns and trends, and correlate information from multiple sources [44]. ...
Digital history-based project-based learning (PjBL) in history learning is a learning medium that can provide a special attraction for students who can improve historical concept skills and historical awareness. However, there are still many teachers who have not used it, so it is very important to study it. This research aims to analyze the influence of the digital history based PJBL model in improving historical concept skills and historical awareness. The method used is quasi-experimental with two classes, experimental and control. The population used class XI high school students in Lampung, Indonesia and the sample size was 213. Cluster random sampling was used to determine sampling, while data collection was in the form of test instruments. The test instrument questions were analyzed using the gain score and Kruskal-Walli’s test to determine the increase in historical concept skills and historical awareness with the help of statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) 26. The research results confirmed that digital history based PjBL was effective in increasing historical concept skills and historical awareness with a high score, making it the best choice to overcome obstacles in history learning.
... Digitisation and data extraction have facilitated more quantitative approaches to history, a discipline previously seen as a largely 'qualitative endeavour'. 106 This has perhaps influenced which historical sub-disciplines have been most active in digital history in Australia to date. There has been a focus on criminal justice records, which has enabled digital history initiatives like the Prosecution Project and Founders and Survivors to use quantitative data to test hypotheses about the factors that influenced prosecution outcomes, or affected the fates of convicts after arrival in Van Diemen's Land. ...
Digital history started to flourish in Australia and New Zealand in the 2000s and early 2010s. But some of this momentum has since been lost due to ageing technologies, a lack of supporting infrastructure, funding issues, discontinued projects, and limited teaching and training opportunities. This ‘state of the field’ article on digital history seeks to encourage greater reflexivity in the discipline by providing a detailed overview of the local context. It highlights some of the longstanding projects that continue to dominate the digital history landscape, while also exploring newly emerging innovations, opportunities and challenges. Examining such topics as infrastructure and tool development, digital archives and repositories, big history, public history, digital methods, and teaching, the authors conclude that additional investment is required to support progress in the field, and to ensure that past projects and data remain accessible into the future.
... 28 While past prosopographical researchers have relied heavily on census and municipal-recorded data, this investigation prioritized the use of obituaries. 29 Communication researchers Janice Hume and Bonnie Bressers suggested paid obituaries, or cyber obits, not written by journalists, were a 'rich narrative source' that provided a glimpse into the social life of ordinary people. 30 The term obituary will be referenced here with the understanding that each did more than just report a notice of death due to the inclusion of personalized biographies of the deceased. ...
Imagined communities have been an influential force in history due to their potent ability to unite and divide people based on narratives centred around identity, allegiance, and pride powerful enough to produce a following and also sacrifice on the part of their devotees. Using the biographical method of prosopography, an interrogation of a historically influential imagined community in sport presented here as the ‘Spurs Family’ identifies the characteristics of this entity and explores ways in which this community has traditionally bonded. Local obituaries of the Spurs Family serve as a cultural and social mirror of the city of San Antonio and offer a window into how an allegiance to an imagined community of fandom in sport is sustained over time and highlights how significant female membership challenges traditional notions of sport spectatorship being male-dominated. A consideration of each of these constituencies is made within the broader context of the framing of imagined communities and concludes with reflections on the use of prosopographical data, together with suggestions as to how obituaries can be used by historians to begin to humanize the sports fan.
... Through the co-existence of quantitative approaches and fundamental qualitative principles it may be possible to build a bridge between the two approaches (Lepper 2016). For Murray G. Philips, Gary Osmond, and Stephen Townsend too, 'distant reading' becomes more productive when linked to the traditional aptitudes involved in 'close reading', namely the ability to contextualize entities and events and raise new issues to achieve more in-depth knowledge of the social phenomena thrown up by the patterns and hypotheses produced by the quantitative analysis of large data sets (Philips et al. 2015). ...
The emergence of big data and data science has caused the human and social sciences to reconsider their aims, theories, and methods. New forms of inquiry into culture have arisen, reshaping quantitative methodologies, the ties between theory and empirical work. The starting point for this article is two influential approaches which have gained a strong following, using computational engineering for the study of cultural phenomena on a large scale: ‘distant reading’ and ‘cultural analytics’. The aim is to show the possibilities and limitations of these approaches in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. The article also focuses on statistics of culture, where integration of big data is challenging procedures. The article concludes that analyses of extensive corpora based on computing may offer significant clues and reveal trends in research on culture. It argues that the human and social sciences, in joining up with computational engineering, need to continue to exercise their ability to perceive societal issues, contextualize objects of study, and discuss the symbolic meanings of extensive worlds of artefacts and discourses. In this way, they may help to overcome the perceived restrictions of large-scale analysis such as the limited attention given to individual actors and the meanings of their actions.
This chapter addressed the application of knowledge management (KM) in the largely unexplored context of arts and humanities. A specific KM approach (distant reading) was applied in the study of a literary text (historical Bosnian novel) to uncover the structure and dynamics of its character network. Using Gephi software and social network analysis measures, the study revealed key players, their ties as well as the strength and cohesion within the network. This helped us to better understand socio-psychological aspects of Bosnian society during the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia. Furthermore, the study suggests that a combination of distant reading techniques and tools can provide valuable support for the complex interpretation of a literary work and enable a better-grounded account of European literary history and cultural identity. More generally, the value of distant reading in KM goes beyond literary history for the purpose of exploring emerging patterns in complex domains from many different sectors of social and economic activities.
Muhammad Ali's name is one of the most significant yet understudied aspects of the great boxer's extraordinary life. Throughout his career, journalists used Ali's birth name (Cassius Clay) and his Islamic name (Muhammad Ali) to transmit their attitudes toward him. This study interrogates trends in newspaper usage of Ali's two names during the 1960s and 1970s as a way to understand changing public attitudes toward him during this period. It does so via a distant reading of 37,911 digitized newspaper articles obtained from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. By quantitatively visualizing trends and patterns in the usage of the two names, this study reveals that American journalists did not embrace Ali's chosen name until 1971. Acceptance of the name in the press was not gradual but was instead characterized by intense shifts at key points in Ali's career. Finally, this paper addresses the value of digital history—specifically, distant reading—for sport history scholars.
When Muhammad Ali died in June 2016, he was remembered by the media as a hero in the fight for racial equality. Tributes for the great boxer were meaningful in many respects, but they were also incomplete, sanitised and misleading. This paper aims to re-complicate our understanding of Ali's portrayals in the media by analysing newspaper discourse in the years immediately following his conversation to the Nation of Islam. Specifically, this investigation compares and contrasts the complex ways that black and white journalists used both his birth name (Cassius Clay) and his adopted name (Muhammad Ali) as a way of signalling their attitudes toward him. Close reading of newspaper articles published between March 1964 and September 1967 reveals that black journalists rejected Ali's adopted name and identity almost as comprehensively as their white colleagues. This aspect of Ali's legacy has been largely forgotten by the contemporary media, which calls us to consider the cultural construction of social memory, particularly when it revolves around sporting icons.
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