Digital humanities as the historian's Trojan horse: Response to commentary in the special section on digital history

Abstract

The commentaries by Baldwin (2018), Green (2018), and Porter (2018) on the 2 articles (Burman, 2018; Flis & Van Eck, 2018) in this special section provide a unique perspective on digital humanities approaches to history of psychology. Each of the commentators approached the topic through their own lens-Melinda Baldwin as a historian of scientific journals, Christopher Green as a pioneer in digital history of psychology, and Ted Porter as a historian of quantification. In my response, I tried to reply to the 3 comments by critically discussing 4 themes the special section has raised: the relationship between digital history and conventional history, the perspective that takes databases as both sources for historians and objects in history, the relationship between "thick descriptions" and "thin" digital ones, and finally, the role of digital history as a type of a "trading creole" between scientists working in quantified disciplines like scientific psychology and less quantified ones like history. I think the commentators have rightly observed some pitfalls in the uncritical application of digital history. On the other hand, in my response, I argue that the careful use of digital methods, where the user stays in communication with nondigital historians, opens new perspectives for historians of science, historians of psychology, and psychologists themselves. Digital methods are not there to supplant historicist work but to add to it and translate it to new audiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).