Digital technology in historical research:contemporary scholarly currents

Abstract

The purpose of the article. This article summarises developments in contemporary Ukrainian history regarding the use of digital technology in historical research, examining both successes and challenges. In writing it, we fill a need within Ukrainian historiography by highlighting the challenges of using digital technologies in historical research, broadly, along with particular obstacles to doing history in the digital era. The methodology of the study is based on a combination of the principles of historicism, objectivity, systematicity, and the use of general scientific methods – analysis, synthesis, abstraction and generalisation; historical methods – chronological, typological and comparative historical; historiographical methods – specific historiographical analysis and synthesis. The scientific novelty of the article is that it is the first attempt at historiographical reflection on scientific publications that highlight the problem of using digital technologies in historical research, the peculiarities of their implementation in the context of the global information society as a new post-industrial form of social organisation. We conclude that a digital turn in history has indeed occurred, as others have argued, and that information technologies have significantly expanded the possibilities for research, storage, and publication. While the field of history remains independent-with its own disciplinary rules, methods, and norms-digital methods have nevertheless irreversibly entered its space. In the last ten years, there has been a certain amount of research around this topic in Ukrainian-language scholarship, which we cover in this paper. Nevertheless, we find that the historiographical and methodological problems posed by digital history have been covered by scholars in an ad hoc and uneven manner. More work is needed, because while the opportunities presented by digital technology are significant, a common understanding of its elements, and even a common definition of digital history itself, will be required for historians to benefit fully from this promise.