Grounding the Models and Recontextualizing the Sources:Historical Research Empowered by Digital Technology
No historical research is possible without sources and models.Models are historians'intellectual constructs that give meaning to past events through simplification and abstraction.How to bridge the gap between sources and models is a challenge that all historians must face.Digital technology,with its powerful data-processing capabilities,offers unprecedented opportunities for grounding models in historical sources.The adoption of digital technology in historical research has profoundly transformed how historians engage with sources.It guides historians to think beyond the original context of individual source materials and facilitates the construction of a more macroscopic and more structured context within which patterns that elude close reading become discernible.This new context,constructed by extracting and linking data from diverse historical sources,is a manifestation of the inherent connections among these sources.As a result,digital technology broadens the scope and paradigms of historical research,encouraging historians to combine case studies with more holistic approaches and to reassess the significance of individual historical phenomenon from more global and integrated perspectives.
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