It has now been 30 years since the English historian Robert John Morris, in an article entitled “History and Computing: Expansion and Achievements”, talked about a vision of the future “in which no historian could operate without being computer literate”. In 1991, he made an assessment of the past decade stating that “there has been a qualitative and quantitative revolution in the relationship between history and computing.” He was obviously imbued with a natural enthusiasm for the novelties and potentialities that then opened up in the relationship between the digital world and the construction of historical knowledge. In view of the progressive consolidation of the Digital Humanities field, which partly incorporated other designations like “History and Computing” and “Digital History”, a theoretical reflection on the theory, practice and epistemology of History in the digital age is relevant. Have the writing of History and the historian’s work been profoundly transformed? Did the methods of History diversify and expand with the greatest interdisciplinarity underlying the Digital Humanities? What new interactions can we see between Digital Humanities and History? To what extent can the Digital Humanities influence the way we look at and use the past, as well as the memory(ies) we build from it? Do Digital Humanities have the potential to break national, linguistic and even academic barriers in the field of History? Or are they going to reinforce elitism, inequalities and hierarchies?
Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past is interested in proposals that focus on theoretical approaches and reflections on the impact, relationship and dialogues between Digital Humanities and the historiographic field.
Main themes
We want submissions that discuss or incorporate, among others, the following themes:
- Critical evaluation of sources and metadata in the digital world
- Criticism and limitations of the digital humanities
- Digital archives and digital heritage
- Digital humanities, history and interdisciplinarity
- Impact on historiography
- Impacts on the writing of history
- Impacts on hermeneutic and theory of history
- Debates on the use of distant reading for historical inquiries
- Public History, uses of the past and memory in the digital age
- Reflections on the world wide web, social media platforms and born-digital documents as an historical problem
- Programming languages, softwares, apps and algorithms in the intersection of theory and methodology
- History teaching and teacher training experiences in Digital Humanities: reflections on pedagogical practice as a construction act of historical knowledge
Submission guidelines
We welcome proposals within this thematic framework coming from researchers in all the disciplines of the humanities. The proposals for publication should be submitted
until 31 October 2021.
Only the articles and essays submitted according to the journal’s guidelines for submission will be considered.
Guest Editors
- Daniel Alves (IHC, NOVA-FCSH)
- Eric Brasil (IHL, UNILAB)
Email: praticashistoria@gmail.com