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1. Designing Our Digital Past: Anchoring Digital-History Tool Development in the Historical Method Through Design-Based History Research

   Craig, Kalani; Danish, Joshua (February 2026, Journal of Digital History)

   Many of the tools digital humanists use have come from a variety of disciplines outside of history. As a consequence, many digital-history methods sections focus on how a tool developed by non-historians might support, or need to be adapted for, particular historical questions. Few digital tools have been developed by and for historians with a specific eye to the methodological and theoretical explorations of design principles that are necessary to anchor digital-history-specific tool development in historiographic practices. This article introduces Design-Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design-Based Research (DBR) is an educational-research approach to studying learning theory that supports theory building by integrating theory into the design of new tools and environments, in a manner that allows the designers to rigorously study the theory, and the relationship between the theory and the tools that embody it (Puntambekar 2018; Sandoval 2013). In practice, this means that DBR focused on software design incorporates theoretically motivated decisions about user interface features, user activities, and data-structure choices into an initial tool/software-package design and then studies the design package in use as a way of iteratively refining the theoretical principles in each of the tool’s design phases. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach, with a theoretical approach grounded in the unique needs of historians and historiographic practices. We aim to illustrate DBHR by describing the design and use of Net.Create, a user-focused network-analysis tool that prioritizes historiographic practices (evidence interpretation, citation preservation, and historiographic debate) in its feature development and user-interface choices (Craig & Danish 2018). We document how the needs of digital historians shaped the current design of Net.Create, explore the connections between specific tool features and their operation, and delineate how those tool features support the digital-history needs we identified. As part of this iterative-design process, we will also address some of the human-computer-interaction observations, user-entered network data, and qualitative-network-analysis approaches that shaped each stage of our feature development around digital history practices. Our DBHR process ultimately led us to prioritize the development of three features that support and encourage sustained historiographic debate at each phase of a network-analysis digital-history project: 1. simultaneous entry and visualization of capta, data that is gathered and contested rather than downloaded or received, in order to support and encourage historiographic debate during the data-gathering phase and prior to a formal analysis phase 2. easy-to-use revision of network taxonomy and network data, to support interpretation, reinterpretation and re-input of evidence and data by many collaborators simultaneously, synchronously or asynchronously, during the initial analysis phase 3. data provenance features that expose the researchers’ positionality and preserve the original citations for each network datapoint, to support the integration of close-reading analytical practices both by the research team and by other historians after the communication of results to a public audience By documenting the historiographic roots of each of these features, we hope to offer a systematic articulation of digital history tool design not simply as software development but as a pathway to the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods. 

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2. DOCU-CLIM: A global documentary climate dataset for climate reconstructions

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02303-y  

   Burgdorf, Angela-Maria; Brönnimann, Stefan; Adamson, George; Amano, Tatsuya; Aono, Yasuyuki; Barriopedro, David; Bullón, Teresa; Camenisch, Chantal; Camuffo, Dario; Daux, Valérie; et al (December 2023, Scientific Data)

   Abstract Documentary climate data describe evidence of past climate arising from predominantly written historical documents such as diaries, chronicles, newspapers, or logbooks. Over the past decades, historians and climatologists have generated numerous document-based time series of local and regional climates. However, a global dataset of documentary climate time series has never been compiled, and documentary data are rarely used in large-scale climate reconstructions. Here, we present the first global multi-variable collection of documentary climate records. The dataset DOCU-CLIM comprises 621 time series (both published and hitherto unpublished) providing information on historical variations in temperature, precipitation, and wind regime. The series are evaluated by formulating proxy forward models (i.e., predicting the documentary observations from climate fields) in an overlapping period. Results show strong correlations, particularly for the temperature-sensitive series. Correlations are somewhat lower for precipitation-sensitive series. Overall, we ascribe considerable potential to documentary records as climate data, especially in regions and seasons not well represented by early instrumental data and palaeoclimate proxies. 

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3. Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions: A global state-of-the-art.

   https://doi.org/doi.org/10.5194/cp-17-1273-2021  

   Nash, D. J. (January 2021, Climate of the past)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract. Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative information into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) CRIAS working group – a collective of climate historians and historical climatologists researching Climate Reconstructions and Impacts from the Archives of Societies – provides the first global synthesis of the use of the index approach in climate reconstruction. We begin by summarising the range of studies that have used indices for climate reconstruction across six continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia) as well as the world’s oceans. We then outline the different methods by which indices are developed in each of these regions, including a discussion of the processes adopted to verify and calibrate index series, and the measures used to express confidence and uncertainty. We conclude with a series of recommendations to guide the development of future index-based climate reconstructions to maximise their effectiveness for use by climate modellers and in multiproxy climate reconstructions. 

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4. Introduction to Focus Section: Computational Perspectives in the History of Science

   Gibson, Abraham; Laubichler, Manfred; Maienschein, Jane (September 2019, Isis)

   Digital technologies have transformed both the historical record and the historical profession. This Focus section examines how computational methods have influenced, and will influence, the history of science. The essays discuss the new types of questions and narratives that computational methods enable, and the need for better data management in the HPS community. They showcase various methodological approaches, including textual and network analyses, and they place the computational turn in historiographical and societal context. Rather than surrender to technophilia or technophobia, the essays articulate both the benefits and the drawbacks of computational HPS. They agree that the future of the field depends on the successful integration of technological developments, social practices, and infrastructural support, and that historians of science must learn to embrace collaboration both within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. 

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5. An island ‘endemic’ born out of hybridization between introduced lineages

   https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16990  

   Salter, Jessie F.; Brumfield, Robb T.; Faircloth, Brant C. (May 2023, Molecular Ecology)

   Abstract Humans have profoundly impacted the distribution of plant and animal species over thousands of years. The most direct example of these effects is human‐mediated movement of individuals, either through translocation of individuals within their range or through the introduction of species to new habitats. While human involvement may be suspected in species with obvious range disjunctions, it can be difficult to detect natural versus human‐mediated dispersal events for populations at the edge of a species' range, and this uncertainty muddles how we understand the evolutionary history of populations and broad biogeographical patterns. Studies combining genetic data with archaeological, linguistic and historical evidence have confirmed prehistoric examples of human‐mediated dispersal; however, it is unclear whether these methods can disentangle recent dispersal events, such as species translocated by European colonizers during the past 500 years. We use genomic DNA from historical museum specimens and historical records to evaluate three hypotheses regarding the timing and origin of Northern Bobwhites ( Colinus virginianus ) in Cuba, whose status as an endemic or introduced population has long been debated. We discovered that bobwhites from southern Mexico arrived in Cuba between the 12th and 16th centuries, followed by the subsequent introduction of bobwhites from the southeastern USA to Cuba between the 18th and 20th centuries. These dates suggest the introduction of bobwhites to Cuba was human‐mediated and concomitant with Spanish colonial shipping routes between Veracruz, Mexico and Havana, Cuba during this period. Our results identify endemic Cuban bobwhites as a genetically distinct population born of hybridization between divergent, introduced lineages. 

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