Month: April 2024

David Thackeray
University of Exeter

The Centre for Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter hosted a workshop with colleagues from Hum:Global, the Global Humanities centre at Copenhagen University, this April on the challenges that the development of digital technologies poses for historians of global history. Amongst the key themes that connect our papers is a concern that many digitisation initiatives continue to focus on the history of the nation state and are driven by commercial imperatives. Existing approaches run the risk of reinforcing historical inequalities in access to knowledge between the Global North and South, an issue which has been discussed at length in a recent ‘History Lab’ feature in the American Historical Review. These concerns are becoming more pressing with the rapid advance of AI.

Jon Lawrence introduced the Living With Machines project (2018-23), a major collaboration led by the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library. As part of this project, the team have explored new ways of using the British Library’s existing digitised newspapers accessible to researchers in new ways. This involves critically reflecting on the decisions which were made regarding which papers to digitise twenty years ago and developing a more representative view of the nineteenth-century newspaper landscape through the development of an ‘environmental scan’.

Stuart Ward discussed his new project which uses the round-the-world travels of Sir Charles Dilke to consider how global imaginaries were reshaped in the late 1860s. Dilke was a young man when he undertook his circumnavigation, which followed the British empire around the globe, and the project was improvised rather than being meticulously planned. One of the challenges of this project will be to use historical newspapers to better understand Dilke’s mental world. Dilke avidly read the local press during his travels to consider how the connections between the different places he visited were being transformed by rapid advances in communications.