Like, I assume, many other people working with digital or computational methods in their respective sub-disciplines, I have recently found myself explaining, yet again, why historians might want to use computational methods and why they have a legitimate place in our field. As I have mentioned in the post where I discussed the formation of DH subdisciplines, I recently was involved in editing a special issue on computational approaches to the history of alchemy and chemistry. In our introduction, we went through many of the questions that tend to come up in this context: What are computational methods? How can they benefit historical research? Why should historians use them? What are their limitations? What are the typical concerns and why doesn’t their mere existence render all computational research obsolete? One of my co-editors even wrote a two-part article specifically on the opportunities and challenges of computational approaches within the history of chemistry. And to a certain degree, I think doing
read more Legitimizing, Yet Again, Why Digital and Computational Methods Are Valid
