Results of the international workshop Digital Methods and Tools for Historical Research, Lisbon, November, 2011

1. Results of the workshop and future directions
Daniel Alves, New University of Lisbon

2. Organization
• Luís Silveira and Daniel Alves (historians)
• 18-19, November 2011
• Lisbon, FCSH, New University of Lisbon
• Web: http://
digital-methods-and-tools-for-history.blogs
/

3. Objectives
• Discuss the implications of using digital technologies in
the production and dissemination of knowledge in
History;
• Understand how digital methodologies has influenced
historical research;
• Discuss advantages and disadvantages, as well as
identify innovative ways of linking the future of the digital
world to the study of the past;
• Stimulate debate about the interaction between History
and Information Technology, and encourage its use by
the academic community, especially young researchers.

4. Programme (day 1)
• Session 1: Primary sources and relational databases
• Session 2: Interaction of space and time: GIS and
History
• Session 3: Decoding historical sources: Text Encoding
• Session 4: Internet, digitization and digital preservation
• Session 5: Digital humanities and research
infrastructures

5. Programme (day 2)
• Workshop 1: Historical GIS
• Workshop 2: Reference Management Software
• Workshop 3: Text Encoding

6. Participants (I)
• Presentations from 9 researchers from several
universities in Portugal, England, Ireland, Germany and
the Netherlands:
• John Bradley (King's College London)
• Joaquim de Carvalho (University of Coimbra)
• Paul Ell (Queen's University Belfast)
• Luís Silveira (New University of Lisbon)
• Malte Rehbein (Universität Würzburg)
• Rita Marquilhas (University of Lisbon)
• Melissa Terras (University College London)
• Daniel Gomes (Portuguese Web Archive)
• Peter Doorn (Data Archiving and Networked Services,
Nederland)

7. Participants (II)
• About 60 participants, including students, researchers
and teachers of diverse backgrounds, from various
Portuguese, English, and Spanish institutions;
• 40 of them attended the workshops on day 2;
• NeDiMAH was represented by Leif Isaksen, University of
Southampton.

8. Results (I)
• Giving the narrative nature of the discipline itself, we
must find ways of using and exploring models of
structured data (databases; XML; GIS) that pay special
attention to textual sources;
• The importance of building tools that can deal with large
corpus of textual information was one of the features
highlighted in virtually all the presentations;
• The relevance of combine "distant" and "close" reading
in the analyses of historical records;

9. Results (II)
• The potential of visualization techniques in the analysis
of large data sets;
• The ability of crowdsourcing methods and tools for
engaging a wider audience in research activities, and
making vast collection of manuscripts more easily and
rapidly available for historical research;
• The ability of web visualization tools to combine time and
space, to transmit a sense of place, to superimpose past
and current events, and to engage users;

10. Results (III)
• The “Digital” didn’t provoked a “revolution” in the
production and dissemination of knowledge in History,
but has brought interesting developments and new
challenges;
• Interdisciplinary encouragement is an important result;
• Collaborative work is another major feature;
• The importance given to texts and textual sources;
• But it’s also a major challenge to the historian’s training;
• The historian (the humanist) must not let himself become
dazzled by the technology and by an endless experiment
with tools each time more powerful and more available.

11. Future (needs?)
• The need for new ways to represent spatial-temporal
information is increasingly felt;
• The same for visualization techniques that must have a
better ability to represent networks;
• The need to preserve and value cultural heritage,
whether it has born in the digital format or converted
from the analog.

12. Outputs
• Six researchers that presented their work in the
workshop accepted the challenge to put together a
proposal for a special issue in an international peer
review journal
• Six papers, plus an introduction, were sent for peer
review in the beginning of September 2012