History’s future in the age of the internet

Ian Milligan’s History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research (2019) presents and interrogates the challenges and opportunities that born-digital materials have for historians. Milligan argues that historians who wish to grapple with the archived internet need to think much more aggressively about engaging with digital methods and tools that can complement and extend the well-honed practices of close reading with approaches that can help analyze the vast and often unstructured archives of internet data. In this AHR Review Roundtable, three historians—Jo Guldi, Tim Hitchcock, and Michelle Moravec, all of whom incorporate digital approaches and concerns into their work—engage with a set of questions developed by Digital Scholarship Librarian Daniel J. Story, to discuss Milligan’s treatment of the digital archive of the web and its implications for historians’ work. Milligan offers a response to these insights and critiques, emphasizing the need for the historical discipline to change from within and build upon its valuable qualities.