The more business and organisational historians focus on the events of the late twentieth century and beyond, the more they are finding traces of the past that were created digitally. Despite the increasing relevance of emails, webpages and other born-digital material, there has been little reflection on how scholars should deal with them methodologically. Our roundtable brings together scholars from different disciplines who have explored the many ways in which digital sources can be used and are being used. Several are early career researchers (ECRs) themselves (Drs Hannigan, Nix, Ogden) and the topic is of particular relevance to ECRs as they are perhaps more likely to engage with new types of sources and new methods in order to make their mark as scholars.
The goal of this roundtable is to explore the challenges that arise at the intersection of different disciplines as they attempt to make sense of digital sources. The underlying rationale is as follows: Sources and methods for business historians have expanded in recent years as more and increasingly heterogeneous artifacts are being generated (Rosenzweig, 2003; Kirsch, 2009). On the one hand, these developments have led to a flowering of new types of inputs for historians writing about business such as digitized newspapers and remotely accessible archival collections. Combined with complex search tools that allow scholars to filter ever larger and more diverse sets of historical materials, business historians are now able to make new and different kinds of knowledge claims. However, taking advantage of these opportunities can require research tools which are outside the skillset of any single researcher, historian or otherwise. Therefore, business historians may need to look outside the boundaries of the field for productive, knowledge-generating partnerships. Hence we have focused on bringing an interdisciplinary group of scholars together, which is of particular relevance to ECRs as research trends and funders increasingly focus on the ability to engage in interdisciplinary conversations.
In this spirit, the panel will feature scholars from business history (Dr Gavin Benke, Boston; Prof. Stephanie Decker, Bristol; Prof. David Kirsch, UMD; Dr. Adam Nix, DMU) as well as information science (Prof. Douglas Oard, UMD; Dr. Santhilata Kuppili Venkata, TNA), organization science (Prof. Timothy Hannigan, Alberta) and social science (Dr. Jessica Ogden, Bristol). These fields are also struggling with the problem of "telling complex stories" but are doing so with different tools and to answer different questions. In the process of so doing, however, these scholars are engaged with business historians as collaborators and partners. Therefore, the "story" of the panel is two-fold: first, adjacent fields are facing similar problems to those confronting business historians writing in the digital age, and second, these adjacent fields are natural allies with business history in helping address the challenge of "telling complex stories."
To capitalise on the rare opportunity to bring such an intellectually diverse group of scholars together, we aim to run this session in a different format and propose short talks from the participants, with a brief opportunity for questions straight after. The session will be opened by members of an existing research theme and will focus on key issues encountered in the project. Other members of the team will manage discussions, monitor the chat, and summarise and wrap up the session at the end.
Structure of the session:
Introduction and reflection on the difficulties in using digital sources (10 minutes)
Stephanie Decker (University of Bristol), David Kirsch (University of Maryland), Santhilata Kuppili Venkata (The National Archives, UK), Adam Nix (De Montfort University)
We will begin the roundtable by introducing the AHRC-funded “Contextualizing Email Archives” (CEA) project, which uses the email archive of a failed dot.com start up to develop ways in which to use email as historical source. Here, we will focus on the issues that arise when dealing with digital sources and reflect on the problems than can occur when trying to use existing tools from other disciplines for historical research.
Discussion and comments (10 minutes each)
We will move on to comments from our roundtable panellists, who each represent a different disciplinary approach and who have worked with digital sources on other projects. We have asked each of them to briefly outline what kind of digital sources and tools they have used and what kind of issues they encountered. We also asked them to comment on the points raised by their fellow roundtable panellists in the session.
Tim Hannigan (University of Alberta) – Organization Science
Prof. Hannigan was trained as an organizational theorist at Oxford with Marc Ventresca and uses computational social science (especially variations of topic modeling) to study construction of narrative. He is currently working on a paper using these methods to explore a phenomenon he calls "Reverse History" that looks at the mechanisms by which organizations selectively render the past to frame it for contemporary purposes.
Douglas Oard (University of Maryland) – Information Science
Prof. Oard is affiliated with the i-School with a shared appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Prof. Oard has been involved with many projects that involve making sense of large text corpora, including oral history (MALACH), Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), and e-discovery (through TREC). Prof. Oard is interested in the similarities facing journalists, intelligence analysts and historians with respect to processing large-scale collections of data (or archives, in our parlance). He has several ongoing projects that address the challenge of "telling complex stories"; his presentation will situate his current work by looking at how researchers can and should interpret email as a source of evidence.
Jessica Ogden (University of Bristol) – Social Sciences
Dr. Ogden is a sociologist and science and technology studies (STS) scholar, with a particular interest in the ways that new and emergent forms of data (and the practices surrounding their preservation) create the conditions of possibility through which researchers engage with the past. Dr. Ogden’s work in the field of web archiving focuses on both the sociotechnical infrastructures that enable web archival collections and the methodological challenges of engaging these (under-used) sources for historical research. Here, she will reflect on the challenges of using and contextualising web archives as sources, as well as recent attempts to develop methods and tools for widening the use web archives within a range of use-cases that have a bearing on how business histories will be studied in the digital age.
Gavin Benke (Boston University) – Business History
Dr. Benke is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University. For his 2018 book, Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism, Dr. Benke drew on a number of “born-digital” sources from the 1990s and 2000s. These sources included the Enron Email Dataset, which includes both emails and attached files; digitized materials collected as part of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s investigation into the California energy crisis in 2000 and 2001; digitally archived websites such as laydoff.com, which was created by former Enron employees; portions of the Clinton administration’s official White House website; as well as a multimedia CD-ROM business case study. Dr. Benke’s roundtable contribution will focus on the opportunities and challenges such born-digital sources present in terms of research and interpretation, as well as the ways in which such sources can be meaningfully integrated into a broader research project that includes both born-digital sources alongside more traditional primary documents one might find in a archive.
Technical requirements
We can deliver this session in a (BHC) standard 90-minute slot on any standard video conferencing software such as Zoom or Teams. The software should have sufficient capacity to host the expected number of participations.
Panellists should be able to:
- Share screens.
- Mute or unmute participants.
- In the highly unlikely event of a security or behaviour issues to remove disruptive participants from the event.
Participants should be able to:
- Use the public chat function or a Q&A function.
- Use video and audio to ask questions of the panel directly.