Historical research in the 'digital era'

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Historic photograph of HMS Warrior (1863) N298 © National Maritime Museum

Digital photograph of HMS Warrior (2002) © Howard J. Fuller, 2002

My discovery

I have tried something different in the course of my doctoral research. It was not recommended by anyone; as far as I knew no one had attempted it, and perhaps it was only recently that digital research was feasible. I began my archival research taking notes by hand on paper, transcribing them onto my laptop computer, and finally, making photocopies of documents when they seemed most necessary.

It was not long before written notes seemed like scraps of paper. Microsoft Word documents constituted the bulk of my work, and happily so. I could save my material, make backup copies. Type in a few words and I could utilise key word searches to locate that one note amongst hundreds, more and more. I could organise everything into virtual 'Folders’ on my laptop, subdivided into more Folders – and carry it all in a briefcase, everywhere.

The photocopies were another matter. They are expensive in the United Kingdom! Forty pence per A3-copy at the Public Record Office at Kew (they will not consider an A4 sheet, in order to fit the proper citation in the margin, and documents cannot be 'shrunk’ to fit). If I encountered a 'crucial’ printed Admiralty report, for example, I had two choices: either spend a long time transcribing what I felt I needed from the report, or photocopy it. Time or money.

The problem with any transcribing in an archive, however, whether by hand or typing into a laptop, is the element of human error we are all familiar with. Was that sentence the most important one in the paragraph after all? Am I neglecting the larger context? What if what I felt was important then has since changed? Was that really a colon, or a semicolon?

Even if I felt I had money, if not time, to spare for photocopies – to give me the whole document without any future doubts as to what it said or not – I began to accumulate another stack of paper. Remember several hundred documents at hand, organised in a file cabinet, spread around your room or office during the chaotic process of actual writing? These are hard memories, and in hindsight alone perhaps, even 'fond’ ones. But I confess I am not so sentimental. Information recorded on paper is vulnerable. Lose your time-consuming notes or costly photocopies, and then what? However, information stored on computers can be just as vulnerable. I was wisely instructed by my school to always make backups of my work on computer. If the computer crashed, if it was stolen, if I left it on the tube (everyone seems to do that now and then!) all my work was gone too. The same can be said for all my material.

My thesis has involved research abroad as well. Since most of my work was on laptop, backed up on floppy discs (and then, as it piled up, on zip-discs of 100+ megabyte capacity) all I needed to take with me was my laptop. But what of all the photocopies? Either I left them behind or dragged them through the airport. What of the photocopies I was sure to make elsewhere – to drag back as well? At this point I invested in a scanner. The most important photocopies could be scanned into my laptop, hard-drive memory space permitting, and then also, backed up on discs for protection. Now I could take even more with me to and from anywhere, all on a single laptop. This was the beginning of my 'digital research’:

1. To facilitate mobility.
2. To cut down on sheer bulk of materials; now all easily organised and accessible on a PC or laptop.
3. To enable full and perfect multiple copies and backups, made within minutes.

I will add here another implicit advantage: once the material was digitised onto my laptop, I could send copies of material to colleagues either on floppy disc, recordable CD-ROM (CDRs or CDRWs, 're-writables') or email documents to anyone, anywhere, instantly. Furthermore, I could always print this digitised material off on a simple bubblejet printer; so could anyone who received a copy from me via email or disc.

But scanning photocopies or even handwritten pages of notes was not enough, especially when researching abroad. The biggest practical concern for a researcher abroad is money, if not time. Every day you spend transcribing material in an archive is a night spent lodging. How many of us have found ourselves pulled away from a letter collection because we simply did not have the time or resources to explore more fully than we wished! The 'game’ has always been trying to extract as much material as quickly as possible, hoping that we do not overlook something in the process, to have to return to again at 'another time’. Digital research is therefore more than simply digitising historical documents; it is perhaps more importantly about getting the documents in the first place. As such, I soon realised that a scanner was simply not enough; scanning in documents by night which I photocopied by day, at my own expense. About this time, the market for digital cameras did two wonderful things: it introduced the 2-million 'mega-pixel’ range camera (or higher), and dropped the prices.