Ian Milligan, a history professor and Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis at University of Waterloo, works heavily in the digital humanities field. His work has been published in books, including the one to be discussed – History in the Age of Abundance? – and he is active in the digital humanities field, working on committees such as the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.[1] Based on his full CV and obvious engagement with the subject, he is well-poised to be writing a book for historians about the benefits and pitfalls of digital media, it’s availability, and utilizing it ethically.
Milligan’s book aims to cover a few topics within the subject of digital data use by historians. One of the largest focuses, which tends to permeate each chapter, is the ethical component: “how we can responsibly use this content.”[2] Additionally, Milligan hits at one of the biggest issues facing historians with regards to all of this content: “we will be needing to confront these resources – and historians are not ready. This book hopes to change that.”[3] The author argues that as a field, historians have not kept up with the changing needs to analyze, understand, and process the digital information we have access to. Worse yet, we are not keeping pace with invaluable digital resources, such as webpages, which can change quickly or disappear completely. Though Niels Brügger “has probably done the most to bring web archive researchers into a cohesive scholarly community,” Milligan places his work “in conversation” with Brügger’s own scholarship, adding to the available literature while expanding the approach taken to the subject.[4]
One issue that Milligan points out, which I feel is relevant to any historian, is the concept of Big Data. He mentions that there are varying levels of definition, but I align with his own definition of “if it’s more data than you could conceivably read yourself…or that requires computational intervention to make new sense of it.”[5]There is such a thing as “too much” data in a sense that one historian (or even a team) would not be able to get through it and put the results to use. Though I focus my work in a century that does not have a lot of sources widely available, with the digital tools like Internet Archive that are now available, I can easily find almost too much information, when there realistically is not that much! I could see this being almost paralyzing – where do you stop looking and start producing when you have almost limitless sources available?
Milligan, in chapter two, discusses web archives and those who save the data, though I do not believe that he explores this topic thoroughly enough. Though he mentions that decision-makers “need to…be conscious of the decisions they are making” regarding what to keep and what not, there is not a discussion of who is making these choices.[6] The companies he mentions, Internet Archive and different library archives, are faceless people who are deciding on what, or who, gets to stay in these web archives, which future historians will use to understand and reconstruct our present. He does not ask if there should be oversight involved or how this process could be made more inclusive – at least not enough, in my opinion. Additionally, though libraries are supposed to be unbiased, private companies have no such obligation. With Internet Archive holding much of the internet’s history, Milligan does not discuss the question of whether that should be held by just one “person”, and a private one at that. As he mentions, “if something were to happen” to the company, “web archives would continue” but he does not state if the data they hold would be lost or continued through multiple, separate archives, making things more difficult to access.[7]
Questions
1. Who should be allowed to make the decisions of what is saved or not? Should there be some oversight to those making choices?
2. If we are choosing to leave certain things out, does that not repeat past issues with consciously or unconsciously silencing some voices?
3. Is an impermanent web archive inherently a bad thing? Does our society put too much emphasis on data immortality?
[1] Ian Milligan. Ian Milligan, December 10, 2024. https://www.ianmilligan.ca/.
[2] Ian Milligan. History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, 6.
[3] Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 20.
[4] Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 25.
[5] Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 56.
[6] Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 63.
[7] Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 75.