Why? Because it’s there!

Also: because it’s a great visual metaphor for learning digital history. I’m nothing if not subtle.

Introduction

most recent update: August 7 2026

Magdalen College Cambridge holds the archive of the explorer George Mallory. We are going to work with this body of materials to learn various tools and techniques of digital history. Well, this body and several others. Things are fluid. This is all about the journey, after all. And that’s at least three different metaphors. Anyway.

I am starting a project on the archaeology of Mount Everest called The Archaeology Impossible Project, and so I am using this course to not only give you an opportunity to work with a bounded, interesting, corpus of historical documents but also to kick start the project. Go have a look now at what that project proposes. Then come back here. (I feel I should point out that the AIP is about climbing culture in general, not Mallory in particular. I also have other sets of materials that I am pulling together for AIP that we might explore - mainly imagery, but also some stats.)

There are a variety of flavours of digital history; I tend to categorize them by the eventual aims of the investigator.

• There is a digital history meant as preservation and access: aspects of digitization, data management, metadata.
• There is a digital history meant as public story telling
• There is a digital history as history influenced by quantification and analytics.

I confess, I tend more towards the third option in my own work. But I also sometimes get creative; I do work in data sonification for instance. If you want some guidance for that side of things, just let me know.

Digital History is Part of the Digital Humanities

That is to say, I make a distinction between computational history and digital history. The former deploys tools to answer or solve problems. The latter requires a bit more unpacking:

Digital History, as something that can be part of the Digital Humanities, is not unified by a set of methods or philosophy. But as part of DH, I think Lisa Spiro’s 2012 piece ‘“This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities’ captures so much of what makes DH… DH. Please have this read as soon as possible, because I want to talk about this on day 1. Please also read the following sections from Adam DJ Brett’s piece on defining DH): 1. Definition Debate 2. Transformations not tools

I really like this bit:

Digital humanities are a contested ensemble of methods, infrastructures, pedagogies, institutions, and critical practices through which humanists create, preserve, model, analyze, publish, and critique cultural evidence in digital forms. […] “Contested” because the field has argued about its own boundaries for decades, and those arguments are themselves part of the field. “Ensemble” because no single method or tool defines it. “Cultural evidence” because the objects of humanistic study, whether a medieval manuscript, a nineteenth-century sermon, a bundle of letters, or an archaeological site, are what the whole apparatus exists to serve. And “in digital forms” because the heart of the matter is transformation. A manuscript becomes an image. A sermon becomes machine-readable text. A correspondence becomes a network. A landscape becomes a map layer. Digital humanities is the study of what happens in those transformations, what they make possible, and what they put at risk. - Adam DJ Brett

This course lives within that framework.

Goals

My goals are several:

• for you to identify a lens on the work that interests you
• for you to develop foundational abilities for pursuing those interests
• for you to develop a reflexive engagement with the shifting landscape of digital transformations as they pertain to history / public history.

I expect you to fail gloriously, which is to say: digital work is frustrating and things often don’t work the way you want them to. To ‘fail gloriously’ is to be open about what has not worked (as is safe/appropriate for you to do so, given your own situation) so that your colleagues and peers can learn from your experience. Basically, it’s silly to always be reinventing research, research workflows, etc all the time.

However: Stuff isn’t going to work. It’s just the way it is. Digital approaches are replete with tacit assumptions and things-left-unsaid. There are generational aspects at play, too. Those of us who came of age in different eras of digital tech - the home computer boom of the ’80s, the early web of the ’90s, etc etc - were exposed to different ways of thinking about what computers/digital techs were for and how best to use them. This will mean that I will make assumptions about your starting proficiencies which may or may not be warranted.

I expect you to call me on this. After all, how else can we learn?

Therefore, we will begin with this corpus of material of this Edwardian man, this product of Empire, this veteran of WWI, this colonial explorer. We will develop our skills through digital manipulation of his papers and letters (some of which were found on his body in 1999 when it was discovered on Mt. Everest.)

How class meetings will work

In general, each week one of you will take us through your exploration of the materials. You will have chosen a particular project to explore or tutorial to try out (these are listed on the schedule). Your goal will be to explain to us about your critical engagement. Perhaps a project shows its code- can you replicate it? Can you reproduce it? What information was left tacit in the tutorial? And so on. Tell us where you got stuck. Tell us how you solved the problem. Tell us how what you learned sheds new light on Mallory and his world (etc). Tell us how what you learned might be useful for your own research (whether for your eventual thesis/MRE or in other classes; this is more important than Mallory!)

You will reflect on how the tutorial you will lead intersects with your other courses, your own research, and indeed, the few readings that I will provide you (I expect you to follow through links to bibliography and so on wherever you encounter them, whether on this site or elsewhere and to bring those to bear in the conversation). If you are not leading the post-mortem, I still expect you to be familiar with the tutorial or project, the associated links and so on so that we can have a productive conversation.

Things you’ll produce

• a digital lab notebook with all the things in it that Future You will need down the road when it comes time to do your MRE, filled as it will be with digital awesomeness
• a guided session for your peers on the ins and outs of a particular digital method
• an experiment in digital history you have designed, using Mallory’s materials as your source information
• an unessay where you tell me about the issues that emerged in the experiment that don’t actually go in the reporting on the experiment. The experiment and unessay are two facets of the same thing.

I’ve taught varieties of this course over the years. The most successful version was fully online, asynchronous, and exhausting, but it worked. The reason it worked is because people made a good faith effort to connect with one another, to support one another, to share problems and solutions. Digital history can’t be done by heroic lone scholars. To ask for help is a sign of strength and scholarly maturity.

So let’s get started

I’m not trying to teach you ‘how to code’. I’m teaching you how to see the world from a particular perspective. My ambition is that this will equip you to deepen your scholarly sensibility and ambition. To that end, spend some time with:

• Working Papers in Critical Search
• Reviews in DH
• A gentle intro to DH code issues Nb This is a work in progress. It asks you some questions about your familiarity with code issues, and suggests some guided tutorials to help familiarise you with the issues. It makes an estimate as to the amount of time these things take; that estimate is 100% pure hot air because I have not idea. So don’t get hung up on things; just explore. See if there’s anything on offer in there that you’d like to know more about. This site is not comprehensive; dh contains multitudes!