Using digital sources: the future of business history?

Abstract

As historians start researching the late twentieth century, they are increasingly finding traces of the past created digitally. At the same time, use of computers to digitise analogue material means that many pre-digital sources have been reproduced digitally. As such, future historical research will increasingly include digital forms of evidence and computer-based research tools. This article explores how such resources might be used within business history, bridging the gap to digital history, and reflecting upon their methodological implications. We present a framework for distinguishing between sources, elaborating their differing digital characteristics and historical authenticity. We then draw on our own use of digital company records and media archives to outline two different ways digital sources can be interrogated by business historians. We argue that digital sources afford unique insights and new opportunities for historical knowledge production, but to access them, business historians will likely adapt aspects of their future practice.

Keywords:

• Digital history
• digital humanities
• digitisation
• born-digital
• reborn-digital

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The dataset was also originally available via a FERC; however, it is now only available via third parties. We used a version made available via Carnegie Mellon University (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/∼enron/).

2 The number of emails also reduced after the company’s bankruptcy in late-2001; however, it is likely that this was because fewer emails were being sent in the first place.

3 This research project was conducted by the second author with a different team of collaborators.

4 There are a number of packages available: Voyant Tools offers the widest range of features: https://voyant-tools.org/. AntConc is freeware: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/. WordSmith and WMatrix cost £50 per licence: https://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/ and http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/. We used WMatrix for this project as it facilitates semantic analysis.

5 Project ARCHANGEL seeks to safeguard the future of digital records by creating assurances of digital record integrity through distributed ledger (blockchain) technology. The aims are to protect data against tampering and restore trust in digital records.

6 For an introduction to the BNC, see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.

7 WMatrix is about 91 percent accurate in identifying semantic domains (Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S., & McEnery, A. M. (2004). The UCREL semantic analysis system.) so we excluded any errors in identifying the correct semantic domain from our analysis.