Journal of Digital History

12/09/2025

Methodology-focused: How can historians work with thousands of hours of sound? This article introduces segmentation & dimensionality reduction methods for large-scale radio archives, showing how computational analysis reveals hidden structures in public service broadcasting

This work aims to explore the relationship between sound archives and historiography, focusing on the Swedish case of mass media archiving from the 1980s. The study investigates the sonic content of public service radio changes during the introduction of commercial broadcasting, using computational....

17/07/2025

A forthcoming article in the Journal of Digital History presents a method for exploring visual collections through interactive panels inspired by Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, using Aventura.js to analyze the 19th‐century Carguero

This article presents a method and a tool for exploring visual collections, drawing on symbolic connections, through the use of data processing and interactive data visualisation. The approach is deeply inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, particularly by his Mnemosyne Atlas project. Building on thi...

25/06/2025

How did British citizens experience sickness & disability policy under New Labour? This article uses blogs, message boards & the Internet Archive to explore how workers, managers & families navigated welfare reform—and how they remembered the welfare state.

The turn of the millennium saw significant shifts in British social security and employment policy for sick and disabled people. On the one hand, European and anti-discrimination laws gave individuals greater protections. On the other, active-labour-market policies from the in-coming Labour governme...

24/06/2025

What if digital tools didn’t summarize a whole corpus - but helped historians find meaning in just a few documents? GaLiLeO (Galileo’s Library and Letters Online) is a prototype digital lab that builds interpretive paths through Galileo’s letters, books & notes.

This article reports on a prototype digital laboratory of tools for the discovery of interpretative pathways through historical materials related to Galileo Galilei (1563-1642). GaLiLeO: Galileo's Library and Letters Online allows a user to contextualize a document or term within a broader corpus of...

24/06/2025

What sources do we have to describe the history of political web defacements? And how can archived copies of hacked web sites help complete our understanding of the history of the web? Our new article describes the work to make over 10.000 web defacements available for research purposes.

Despite their significance, political web defacements remain an underutilised resource for research on both the history of activism on the web as well as subaltern political communication. Web defacements as a form of hacktivism are rarely archived and thus mostly lost for systematic study. When the...

19/05/2025

Discover Arvest, the cloud-based platform for IIIF image & video annotation. No server installation needed - just create an account and start annotating your digital resources immediately. Try it today at arvest.app

The rise of born-digital materials and the digitization of existing archives is fundamentally changing the nature of sources that humanities researchers work with. As sources transform to multimodal digital traces from which we look to extract data it becomes necessary to also reflect upon the digit...

26/03/2025

Dive into history with our latest JDH article! Discover how we modelled airborne dust from the past Belval steelworks using atmospheric dispersion. Visualize the past, understand the present.

This research combines current scientific knowledge and historical data to model the airborne dust concentration generated by the Belval steelworks in Esch-sur-Alzette between 1911 and 1997. The calculations are based on a model of atmospheric dispersion, using parameters such as production volumes,...

25/03/2025

Second article in our new v3 (beta) design! 🚀
Discover how the perspective of a citizen scientist from the Italian borderlands contributes to an historical understanding of borders. This study follows the experience of an individual who shares her knowledge of shifting borders, from the collapse of communism to the impact of EU expansion to her imaginations of the border’s future. how the perspective of a citizen scientist from the Italian borderlands contributes to an historical understanding of borders. This study follows the experience of an individual who shares her knowledge of shifting borders, from the collapse of communism to the impact of EU expansion to her imaginations of the border’s future. #

This article unravels the opportunities and limits for generating new academic knowledge about the use of articulations of time in interviews conducted and produced by students. We narrate the experiences of a citizen scientist throughout an interdisciplinary experiment in which citizen scientists a...

19/03/2025

📢 New Call for Papers: AI & History ✨
While historians must examine the disciplinary implications of increasingly prevalent AI-enabled software, it is imperative to contextualize this recent technological integration within a broader historical framework, our primary objective of this Journal of Digital History call for papers. Submit your abstracts by May 31, 2025! https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/cfp/ai

17/02/2025

First article in our new v3 (beta) design! 🚀
Introducing the Video Reuse Detector: A machine-learning toolkit designed to track the reuse of historic footage across audiovisual archives. Discover how AI is transforming digital history.

The reuse and reappropriation of audiovisual content have been a recurring topic of research in the humanities, not least in studies of remix cultures. An open question that remains, however, is how artificial intelligence and machine learning may help scholars study the reuse of audiovisual heritag...

17/02/2025

At the Journal of Digital History, we are ensuring that the articles we publish are reproducible. This has a cost: substantial time investment. Our analysis of 16 of the articles we have published since 2021 demonstrates significant duration in technical review processes and peer reviewer acquisition.

This editorial analyses the challenges and time costs associated with ensuring reproducibility of the Journal of Digital History's articles. We examine the journal's complex workflow, which includes technical and design reviews, peer review, and infrastructure development. Using data from 16 publish...

07/02/2025

A qualitative and quantitative network analysis of Chinese intellectual activists that demonstrates unsuspected linkages and consequences to their studies in France, Germany, and Belgium

The Chinese experienced dynamic changes in the twentieth century and few groups were as transitional as Chinese intellectuals. Grappling with new roles within the world of education and politics, there was an explosion of creative and diverse responses. This study will utilize data on 197 Chinese st...