Essays
Digital World History: An Agenda
The late twentieth century brought an extraordinary expansion in knowledge about
the past. In addition to the deepening of many localized studies of history, this expansion
of knowledge brought about a dramatic transformation of World History. The field that
had previously centered on speculative attempts to identify large-scale and long-term
patterns turned to assessment and coordination of the many new types of knowledge
about the past. National history, civilizational history, area-studies history, imperial
history, and prehistory now overlapped as aspects of human history. New data, new
theories, and cross-disciplinary cooperation generated knowledge in the natural sciences
of the distant past and the world of today. The new knowledge, exciting but always
incomplete, fueled a search for still more knowledge. We have now the beginnings of a
narrative of the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and of the
spread, divergence, and convergence of our ancestors throughout the planet. We can
document today's global interactions in culture, politics, and economics. And we are
learning about the past human impact on the natural environment as well as the certainty
that accelerating environmental change will bring us as many disasters as comforts. The
work of world historians is to assemble and interpret this multidimensional knowledge.
But history at the world scale is unfamiliar. Neither researchers nor readers are yet
comfortable with interpreting the global past, so the analysis lags far beyond the
accumulation of new information. This is arguably the biggest problem in the study of
world history: how are we to encourage historical research at scales beyond the national?
Such research and interpretation is advancing spontaneously, along with the broader range
of historical data and the posing of global problems today. But the spontaneous advance
is very slow, since the institutions for preparing historians focus overwhelmingly on
training in national and area-studies history and center on one or two centuries out of the
whole human past. As I argue, the best hope of advance in our methods and
understanding lies in collaborative study and major research projects.
Meanwhile, the digital revolution began. The emergence of digital computers
brought the discovery, retrieval, and creation of new information in every field of human
activity. In history, early digital work brought quantitative analysis of political, social,
and economic processes—at this stage, the computers digitized numbers and sorted them.
Then came electronic text, hypertext, and the beginnings of e-mail in the 1980s—at this
stage, the computers digitized texts and linked them. Then came the internet in the
1990s—when computers digitized images and manipulated visual data.
For the small but expanding field of world history, digital analysis and display
were ultimately to have great implications, but it took a while before the implications
became widely evident. The path linking digital history to world history is neither short
nor straight. From the 1960s through the 1980s, world history was dominated by
civilizational narratives, relying on traditional analysis of texts. Later on, the internet
opened world-wide connections that enabled its users to view texts and images from all
over the world, and to recognize multiple perspectives through the interactivity of digital
media. But the interplay of world history and digital history has remained complex.
While much of the digital approach to history clarifies and advances world history, some
digital navigation focuses on isolated specifics in a fashion that does not fit well with
world history. Similarly, while world history—especially in its multilayered approach to
the past—fits well with the multiple layers of electronic media, the grand narrative
approach to world history does not fit well with digital history.
I am part of the faction of world historians that relies heavily on digital
approaches. My own agenda for research, teaching, and institutional development in
world history provides the story I know best, and I use it here to convey my belief that
there exists a co-evolution of world history and digital history with an immense
potential. My initial research projects were on Africa in world economic history and on
African population in the global system of slavery. In each case the focus was on linking
African developments to those of the rest of the world. From 1990 I became involved in
institutional development of world history. For just over a decade my emphasis was
especially on building centers of specialization in world history, and to a lesser degree on
creating links among world historians. I focused principally on graduate training in world
history and on creating a comprehensive World History Center. The link of research and
teaching was ever-present: a major grant from Annenberg-CPB brought the creation
(especially by graduate students) of Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000, a
CD-ROM that made a major statement on the benefits of digital technology for the
teaching of world history. But I also emphasized cross-institutional work by serving as an
editor of H-WORLD from its foundation in 1994 until 2002. Meanwhile, research on the
slave trade and African population retained its interest as an issue in world history, and I
placed an initial version of my slave-trade simulation online.
From about 2000 my priorities shifted. Having encountered the limits of building
a comprehensive center in world history at a single institution, I gave increasing emphasis
to cross-institutional collaborations. The World History Center (at Northeastern
University) was replaced in 2004 by the World History Network (an independent entity
emphasizing worldwide links). The website of the Network (created as the final project of
the World History Center) facilitates collaboration among researchers and teachers of
world history; it has sponsored two major, international conferences on world history,
both relying significantly on internet communication. World historians are now founding
an International Network of World History Associations, so that the vision of global
collaboration of world historians appears to be within reach. I marked this transition in
priorities by publishing an overview of the field of world history, as a book. Meanwhile,
my research on slave trade and migration in world history led me to consider migration
over steadily longer periods of time. In a new research project, Christopher Ehret and I
will conduct a multidisciplinary analysis of early human history. The research will
definitely involve digital methods; the presentation is also sure to involve digital
techniques. In sum, the digital dimensions of research, publication, teaching, and scholarly
communications have been ever-present in the implementation of this agenda for world
history.
Overall, I believe that world history and digital history have the potential of
bringing out the best in each other. To advance this argument, I interpret the interplay of
digital history and world history in the four sections to follow. First, I offer my research
on the demographic impact of slave trade as an example of digital world history by
introducing some practical summaries of the research design and results on that topic,
with some suggestions on its world-historical implications. Second, I describe some
contending approaches to world history and try to identify the ones that fit best with
digital history. Third, I consider some general characteristics of the digital revolution and
of digital history. Fourth, I develop the notion of "digital world history" by juxtaposing
certain key factors in world history with others in digital history, and show how they
reinforce each other.
I. The African slave demography project.
My long-term project on the demographic impact of slave trade in Africa relies at
several levels on digital technology. This project—linking African regions with each other
and with the Americas (and with other regions of the Old World)—is not only digital but
world historical in that it links regions often treated in isolation and proposes patterns in
migration that have implications for other situations. It is more than a project of empirical
data-gathering: it also relies on demographic and other social-science theory, and it
depends fundamentally on a computer simulation to link the many data, variables, and
assumptions and yield coherent results. The known data—the empirical base of the
study—include the size and structure of New World populations of African ancestry and
the number of captives carried across the Atlantic, with details on their age, sex,
mortality, and region of embarkation. Unknown are the volume, mortality, age and sex
composition of the enslaved in Africa, plus the size and composition of African slave and
free populations. The objective of the analysis is to estimate the size, composition, and
growth rate of African populations that were undergoing loss to enslavement. My initial
analysis of this problem (published in 1990) concluded that populations declined in West
and Central Africa from 1730 to 1850, and in East Africa from 1820 to 1890, each as a
result of the losses to slave trade.
The digital-history dimension of this study appeared especially in analysis but
also in presentation. The demographic simulation of slave trade provided a digital way of
handling the interplay of numerous demographic factors; also a way of mixing available
historical data with variables for which we must make assumptions for lack of data. Then
I developed a digital form of presenting the results, with graphics created by digital
analysis, in order to show users the range of possibilities. To be more precise, here is an
enumeration of digital aspects of this study:
- Programming the simulation model
- Digital version of graphic display of population pyramids
- Simulation calculations
- Display of simulation results
- Display of systemic relationships between populations of home and
destination.
- Opportunities for readers to test and vary results (they have to keep the
assumed relationships, but can change the data).
- Opportunities to reveal parallel of slave trade to European migration.
- Access to digital representations of documents.
The world-historical dimension of the project lies especially in its revelation of the
systemic linkages in the demography of different continents. For instance, the movement
of male captives to the Americas meant that New World populations were dominantly
male while African populations became dominantly female. These interconnections draw
attention to the roles of small players in this history, and the range of possible outcomes
for any individual or group. The demographic simulation, in its online form, enables
readers to set parameters of historical analysis, and get quantitative and visual (graphical)
results. The reader is able to sense the dynamics of the past.
II. Approaches to world history.
Conceptualizing world history forces one back to the basics of interpretive choice.
World history is the totality of the past, yet there is no way for us to document or
comprehend that totality. So we must abstract from world history in general and select
the simplification of the past that best suits our purposes. The alternative simplifications may be
reduced to three. World history can be seen as chronicling the totality of local events
and processes, without great attention to the larger patterns of the events—this is world
history as chronology, an approach that was influential in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. World history can be seen as assessing the dominant patterns in
human development, without great attention to small-scale processes—this is the master
narrative, an approach influential in the civilizational narratives of the twentieth
century, and which can be extended with the expansion of scientific knowledge on early
times. Third, world history can be addressed through tracing the interactions of
processes at a large scale, at local levels, and in between, with alternation among these
levels—this is the study of historical interactions, connections, and parallels which has
been gaining influence in recent years.
Each approach has its strengths and all will surely stay with us, but my own
interest has been consistently in the third—the interactive approach to the human past. I
assume a basic similarity in human motivations and patterns of action, and assume that
they are connected from one place to another, but conclude that the results of these
motivations and actions appear different in varying situations, because of different
environments and connections. I'm a social scientist by training and inclination, so much
of my work has involved quantitative studies, but I believe the same approach is relevant
for cultural issues and for human interactions with the natural environment. This
approach leads—in research, analysis, and presentation—to a world history of complexity.
It is an approach quite different from the world history of the master narrative—the
history of one great, dominant trend—and different again from chronicles of the past.
How should world history be narrated, in order to become comprehensible to audiences?
Three concepts of world history lead to delivery of contrasting narratives.
Chronicles of world history, rich in data, shift from topic to topic and event to event,
providing a dense texture but little sense of direction or process in the past. Assessments
of dominant patterns abstracted from these details present linear narratives of world
history. These focus on a few key factors that are taken to explain a great deal of the past:
they highlight the great powers, dominance, diffusion of influences from
centers of power to other regions, central tendencies rather than dispersions, unity and purity
within leading historical trends, uniqueness, and have a
tendency to conduct analyses on the most readily available data. Studies of interactions
among processes lead to multidimensional narratives of world history, focusing on
complex rather than simplified patterns: multidirectional interaction rather than one-way
diffusion, mixes, dispersion rather than central tendency, and parallels in historical situations.
These tend to seek out or develop new data rather than to limit themselves to work with
existing data. The focused narratives of W. H. McNeill's civilizational history and Jared
Diamond's tale of the long-term epidemiological effects of the rise of agriculture balance
the multidimensional narratives of Lauren Benton's analysis of evolving legal systems and
David Christian's narratives of shifting scales in the history of the cosmos.
Here is a related dilemma, phrased in terms of the design of world-historical
research. Researchers face a choice between giving top priority to available data or to
historical questions. When researchers focus on available data, they are likely to produce a
world history that emphasizes written sources, state action, and those areas of the world
where written sources are most numerous. In this case, the data tend to set and limit the
historical questions that are investigated. When researchers focus on identifying and
answering historical questions deemed to be important, they may find themselves short of
data on key aspects of the question. They respond by developing devices that
compensate for the shortage of available data, using theory, transformation, simulation,
and even creation of data to analyze.
A third way of posing the choices of world-historical researchers phrases the
dilemma in terms of philosophy. In the nineteenth century, a time of big ideas but limited
technology, analysts found a way to maximize the advance in their knowledge:
positivistic thinking. That is, they took complex realities and simplified them into small
numbers of variables and simple relationships, separating each issue from others. The
twentieth century, a time of more advanced technology but also a time in which people
encountered the limits of simple determinism, brought postmodern thinking. Analysts
included more variables and showed more interest in connections among them and in
varying frames of analysis. The debate between these two philosophies is turning out to
be indecisive: they are complementary or at least supplementary ways of thinking, and
neither is able to gain access to general truth. Even the episodic or empiricist approach to
knowledge has its value, as there are issues in which our knowledge is simply insufficient
to identify the patterns and processes, so that empirical description is the best we can do.
World historians, like all analysts, are divided into positivists and post-modernists.
Some
world historians accept the emphasis of post-modern theorists on
complexity and indeterminacy in history. But world historians will not join post-
modernists in rejecting the possibility of a narrative—instead they will try to draw a clear
if complex narrative out of the history they study. To return to narrative, we may
distinguish linear narratives of world history (which owe their approach to 19th-century
thought) from complex narratives of world history (which draw on newer models of
interpretation).
In the present time, I believe, the most knowledge is to be gained by exploiting
models of complexity. In world history, the approach of identifying interactions among
processes (at various scales), the historian focuses on perceiving and portraying a history
of complexity. This brings a dual dilemma: locating complexity and managing
complexity. One must seek out the complexities in the past, then analyze them to obtain a
sophisticated yet simplified interpretation. The task has its inherent difficulties, and it is
all the more difficult for those schooled in positivistic simplifications. Here are four main
types of conceptual and analytical problems that recur in studies of world history. First
is the need for flexibility of scale: world historians must balance local with global spaces,
short with long spans of times, and must consider a wide range of topics. Second is the
need to account for a multiplicity of perspectives—differing perspectives of historical
actors but also the varying disciplines and theories of analysts. Third is the centrality of
the analysis of connections and interactions in the past, and the need for a coherent
approach to them. Fourth is the need to balance the complexity of the interactions within
historical systems against the need to identify the dominant patterns and trajectories of
these same systems.
III. Digital technology and digital history
What is digital history? The editors of this volume have provided a general
statement on the nature and implications of digital history. In this section I supplement
their statement with a few additional words, to help identify the links of digital history
and world history. I begin with a reminder of the difference between analog and digital
technology in information technology: analog information is in the continuous form of
waves of sound and light; digital information consists of discontinuous data or events.
Digitization is a transformation of the audio or video wave signal that breaks it into
electronic pulses, which are represented through a binary code. In one sense the analog
world of light and sound is the real world we live in, while the digital world is abstract and
artificial. On the other hand, digital—that is, discontinuous—dimensions of reality have
been with us forever. That is, the quantum behavior of atoms and the DNA code of
genetics can be seen as the discontinuous, digital basis of matter and life, so that the world
we live in relies naturally on a balance of analog and digital phenomena.1 In our own day,
however, the long-standing balance of analog and digital dimensions of reality has been
shifted sharply by the development of digital technology in computers. So it is helpful to
think of analog and digital forms of data each as both real and abstract. The terms "analog"
and "digital" both refer to representations of reality, in waves or in bits. The
representations can become reality itself, as in music and painting. In our attempt to
understand reality, in past and present, techniques of correlation and simulation are
essential in enabling us to interrelate digital and analog data and to answer historical
questions.
The creation and use of digital data in our basically analog world can be broken
down to a number of steps, most of which can be shown to have implications for our
understanding of historical analysis:
- Select original data, assumed to be in analog form.
- Digitize—transform and encode the analog data according to set
procedures.
- Copy the digital data (hopefully without changes).
- Transmit the digital data.
- Store the digital data; digital storage allows different types of searching
and browsing.
- Browse and retrieve the digital data.
- Sort the data; there are many different sets of rules for sorting. Among
quantitative data, there are different rules for nominal and ordinal data
(which are discrete) and interval data (which are continuous). These are different from data for
texts (which include grammars) and for images.
- Analyze the data via correlating and comparing, using various statistical
and textual procedures; rules for analysis are parallel to those for sorting.
- Manipulate the data, as by adding new data or editing it.
- Transform it to simulate the original analog data.
- Observe the data in analog form, and interpret it.
If the above list identifies the steps necessary for digital transformation and
analysis, which of these steps provide benefits to users of accessing digital data (really,
digitally mediated data) that are not available by turning pages or looking at chalk boards?
Here is an initial list:
- Copying (and enhancing) analog originals
- Storing data
- Sorting data and analyzing relationships within the data
- Retrieving data selectively
- Presenting data, especially by combining data not initially linked
- Using layers of data or processes (e.g., Photoshop as a metaphor for types of historical analysis)
- Using data in simulations, translations and approximations
- Using data in animations to help convey dynamics of the past
Digital history has the potential to be complex, nuanced, interactive, systemic, and
balanced. These characteristics do not necessarily add up to historical truth, but they
provide hypotheses to test, and may draw out evidence in support of (or in contradiction
to) this vision of world history. The most interesting benefits of digital history
to me are that it encourages translation and simulation, it encourages
the creation (not just the transformation) of data, it emphasizes parallels in the past and it
foregrounds the study of mixes in history. For authors, digital history has major
implications in the design and conduct of research, in the nature of analysis and
interpretation, and in the presentation of results through narrative and documentation. For
others, digital history opens up new techniques for reading and assessing historical
works, including new encouragement to explore the details. The reader is urged to carry
out critique and independent analysis of the work and the issue at hand.
IV. Digital history and world history.
The sharp expansion in global perspectives in history arrived at almost the same
instant as digital technology. Are the two connected? Does one really help the other?
There are clear differences between the two, in that the world and its large-scale
phenomena have always been there. What is new is not global patterns but the expanded
human perception of them. And even in perception, notions of the world—the cosmos,
the universe, the earth, and humanity—have existed for very long times; it is only that
they can be applied with far greater specificity because of our expanding scientific
knowledge. Digital technology, in contrast, is quite new.
World history arose in apparent isolation from quantitative history or digital
history. Writings in world history from the 1960s well into the 1990s pursued a strategy
of linear analysis and linear narrative, dominated by analysis of civilizations and
interactions of continents. This approach was sufficient to establish world history as a
rapidly expanding teaching field. Linear analysis, in history as in other social sciences, can
be interactive, but emphasizes interactions among a small number of variables. The
approach is relatively deterministic, with attention to cause-and-effect relationships. It's
the big picture in history, with the main trends.
Then, in the 1990s, world history courses went online. The approaches of linear
narrative and also the chronicles of civilizations each led to the posting of documents and
lectures that enabled rapid expansion of world history courses at secondary and college
levels. With the use of these materials inevitably came arguments for greater
interactivity—in the form of the online documentation and in the underlying
interpretation. To summarize this phase, here is a list of some advantages of digital
history for world history in general:
- An expanded audience—One can reach a global audience with digital means.
There is a need to write for an audience beyond national frontiers and to develop a language
of history that avoids reliance on national symbols.
- Interactivity—This aspect of digital media links with the interactive logic of
world history.
- Selection—One chooses a path in digital navigation, much as one must
choose in world history.
- Shifting perspectives—One can look at an issue through varying sets of
assumptions or through varying tools.
- System—The logic of systems is important in world history. Is it necessarily
entailed in digital media? Interaction of multiple elements in operation of
an overall system.
Digital media have been extraordinarily helpful in spreading the word on all approaches to
world history—episodic chronicles, linear interpretations, and multidimensional
analyses—especially by providing online documents and interpretive statements on a wide
range of topics. I would label the sum total of this development as "digitally assisted
world history."
For a more conceptually thoroughgoing "digital world history," one needs to see
the advantages of digital technology suffused throughout the processes of research,
publication, and teaching. One must ask what digital history can do to facilitate the
construction of complex and multidimensional narratives. To respond, one may argue that
digital analysis is excellent for handling all the complexities of multiple levels of
aggregation, multiple topics, and multiple time frames (including long time frames). Digital
technology is useful for dealing with interactions; it can trace multidirectional interaction as well as one-
way diffusion. Digital technology can be used to develop a better understanding of the
various types of social mixing in the past. It can trace dispersion in data as well as central
tendency, and can account for parallels in historical situations. With proper
conceptualization, digital analysis can address the need for balance (regional, topical, and
other) in the study of world history. There's a tendency for digital media to focus on the
most easily located icons, but with human input that can be overcome. For instance,
online files of music are amazingly complete in creating access to every kind of recorded
music. Digital media are also excellent in aggregating data of various sources so that, after
accounting for the relevant subsystems and their interaction, it is possible in the same
analysis to provide an overall historical synthesis that identifies the main large-scale
patterns.
Finally, returning to the specifics of the work on understanding the social impact
of the slave trade, one may note that digital techniques make it possible to develop and use
new data in addition to working with existing data, and to use them in simulations of the
past. Simulation is integral to digital work. Similarly, world history (or really any history)
puts us in the position of simulating the past. With world history, one is even further
from the conception that one is actually revisiting the past. And, to address the
practicalities of actually completing the analysis of the demography of African slavery,
digital history requires teamwork—technicians and colleagues of various sorts—and the
resulting exchange of ideas leads to improved world-historical interpretations.
1 Freeman Dyson (Princeton) on digital and analog life. Human genetics is digital,
given the 4-AA basis of the genome. (But the molecules themselves have an
analog existence—though of course they include discrete quantum energy levels.)
The question of whether life is digital or analog. Whether variation is discrete or
continuous.
