It may still be the case that historians, as a whole, are averse to using databases of digitized primary sources in their research. My impression is that this is rapidly changing, however. This impression is admittedly unscientific and based only on the scholarship that I read. My perceptions may also be skewed by the fact that I myself have found digital databases useful in my research, as illustrated by my last post on a Lincoln quote and my previous series on John Brown’s Timbuctoo.
Still, in at least one field–the history of the early American republic–there is lots of evidence that scholars already see digital databases as crucial to their research. Recent historians of the early republic even seem eager to deploy keyword searches and share their digital findings. In this post, I’ll illustrate what I mean by citing some recent examples of how historians in my field are using proprietary digital databases.
For the past year or so I’ve been keeping an incomplete but running list of articles in the Journal of the Early Republic (the official journal of SHEAR) that make explicit use of proprietary databases published by companies like ProQuest, NewsBank and Accessible Archives. By sharing these examples, I hope to provide a quick snapshot of some of the actual practices of historians who use digital databases, particularly historians who don’t seem to identify primarily with the field of digital history or digital humanities. Finally, at the end of the post, I’ll explain why I think historians in my field could benefit from a central online repository that makes information about these databases accessible and keeps track of differences among them.