Mapping is perhaps one of the most exciting facets of digital humanities available to historians, particularly military historians. Maps have always been critical pieces of the history of the military, but historians have also despaired about how to depict a fluid and ever-changing battle with static maps. Digital technologies, particularly web technologies, can allow historians […]

In my last post, I talked about how “big” data can transform a military historian’s perspective. The caveat is that data analysis can be extremely dry and boring: after all, statistical charts and tables are part of the reason that quantitative history does not top the bestseller lists. So part of using data is presenting […]

  One major buzzword in technological circles these days is “big data,” a term that means datasets so large they can’t be easily manipulated, even by computer database systems. Humanities scholars have appropriated the term “big data” to mean something more like datasets larger than could be reasonably used or mined without computational technology. Data-driven […]

In a blog post from November 2012, Paul Mitchell suggests that “militaries are future-oriented institutions.” Though militaries may be future-oriented, technologically advanced, and even experimental, military historians tend to be less so. Indeed, while many public history sites use innovative technology and creative displays to interpret military events, academic military historians have been slower to […]