Are the Arts and Humanities More Digital than the Sciences?

The SMKE workshop on Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century: a Survivor’s Guide on 4 June 2015 was very enjoyable and packed with information. I fear my keynote was less a survival guide than a mixture of personal reminiscence and a chance to share my enthusiasm for work I consider forward-looking, such as the artists Thomson & Craighead, and Ruth Ewan. For what they are worth, the slides from my talk are available at: http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/doing-the-digital-how-scholars-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-computer

The doctoral students and early career researchers who attended this event will have been left in no doubt as to the extent to which academic life and publication expectations in the UK is dominated by the grizzly subject of the Research Excellence Framework (one of the finest examples of Newspeak currently in use in British public life, known affectionately as the REF). The release of the results of the REF, sensitively timed for the week before Christmas 2014, led to a rash of abstruse calculations designed to show that particular universities or departments had done amazingly well, demonstrated in a bewildering variety of league tables. The absurdity of the exercise is illustrated by the way in which universities that evidently had very limited interest in research loudly claimed  to have centres of international excellence. It’s tempting to suggest that the whole thing is an objectionable and unethical intrusion into academic values, as my friend Lorna Hughes argues in her blog, but the outcomes of the REF have to be taken very seriously, as they are not only marketing opportunities for university, but a great deal of funding depends on the REF results, and departments are already being closed down and academics fired or put on teaching-only contracts throughout the UK due to poor REF results. That is the reason UK academics are obsessive about the REF.

Having said that, the publication of the results of the REF offers a great deal of fascinating information about trends in scholarly research in the UK. Statements by each department outlining their research strategy and achievements (environment templates, in REF speak) and describing the impact of their research outside the academy are available for download on the REF website. Details of each of the thousands of pieces of research submitted by individual researchers are also available as spreadsheets. There is an enormous amount of data from the REF available for crunching, and I’m delighted that my friends at the Academic Book of the Future project at UCL and King’s College London will be undertaking a detailed analysis of this data to investigate trends in scholarly publication. Their results will be very interesting, but in the meantime the initial top level analyses on the REF website offer some intriguing insights into the state of digital humanities in the UK.

There were four large subject panels in the REF: Panel A was broadly medicine and life sciences; Panel B included chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering; Panel C was broadly social sciences and law; while most of the arts and humanities were under Panel D. A large number of sub-panels assess individual disciplinary areas (or again Units of Assessments, UoA, in REF-speak). In the previous research assessment exercise in 2008, there were 15 main panels, and 67 sub-panels. In 2008, those digital humanities centres which submitted to the REF chose the Library and Information Science UoA, and they did very well, with both King’s College London and HATII at the University of Glasgow getting particularly good results.

There were two big changes between the exercise in 2008 and REF in 2014 which had major implications for digital humanities. First, it was declared that (with some exceptions which we don’t need to go into here) only academics on full research and teaching contracts were eligible for submission to the REF. This was devastating for digital humanities, since a number of digital humanities centres had submitted to the previous research assessment exercises librarians, curators and staff from information services who were publishing books and articles on digital humanities. These were now excluded from the REF. Moreover, research staff who were working on other people’s projects - a very large proportion of the staff in a department like that at King’s College London - were also excluded (again, there were some exceptions, but we won’t go into the theology of it here). In short, anyone who wasn’t occupying a conventional academic post was generally excluded from the REF. For a new discipline which is predicated on different types of posts with new mixtures of skills, this was devastating, and it meant for example that HATII in the University of Glasgow, which had performed very well in the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008, couldn’t muster sufficient critical mass to be entered in REF 2014.

The second big change arose from the reduction in the number of panels. This meant that disciplines were arbitrarily grouped together to reduce administrative costs. Some of the initial proposals - for example that Classics should be lumped in with History and Archaeology - produced strong protests. Classics was successful through its national subject association in arguing that it should have a separate sub-panel. Library and Information Science was merged with Cultural and Media Studies in UoA 36: ‘Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management’ - unlike Classics, the librarians were unable to fend off this change. (Incidentally, the hope sometimes expressed that Digital Humanities will eventually have its own sub-panel in the REF is pie in the sky. With the trend towards merger of disciplines in the REF to reduce costs, Digital Humanities will not have its own sub-panel until it is of a size comparable to such disciplines as History or Chemistry, which may happen one day, but certainly not in my lifetime.) Given that the intellectual relationship of Digital Humanities to cultural and media studies is a contentious subject, the way in which REF is now providing such a strong institutional imperative for DH to become linked with cultural and media studies is striking, particularly as it is not being driven by the DH community itself. The contrast between the success of Classics (through its strong subject association) in arguing for independent status with the failure of Digital Humanities to have much influence on the REF process is also instructive, and suggests that Digital Humanities in the UK should pay more attention to the creation of a strong national subject association, and pay less attention than it has done in the past to international collaboration, which is of little value in lobbying on REF matters.

It is surprising that this shotgun marriage of Cultural and Media Studies with Digital Humanities in the UK has not been more widely discussed, as I feel it has major implications for the future of Digital Humanities, particularly given the historic prominence of Britain in the subject area. The tactical question for individual universities in preparing their REF submissions was how far their submissions should also fuse the subject areas. For those universities where long-established digital humanities centres, such as the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, were not returned to the REF, their work nevertheless features prominently in the environment templates of their partners, such as the Department of History. In the case of the University of Glasgow, the submission to UoA 36 by the School of Creative and Cultural Arts makes no reference to Digital Humanities activities, but Glasgow’s Digital Humanities activities figure prominently in the University’s submission to the English Language and Literature panel. Some institutions take little account of the merger of the panel in their submissions. The environment template for UCL describes the work of the Department of Information Studies there, with Digital Humanities and the work of UCLDH signalled as one of the major research groupings within the Department, with links to engineering, thus providing a fairly traditional view of the role of DH. By contrast, King’s College London made a joint submission of two departments, the Creative Media and Cultural Industries Department, and the Department of Digital Humanities. The environment template (which I helped to write) offers an intellectual synthesis of the two subject areas that responds strongly to the changed constitution of the panel.

It is difficult to interpret the panel’s ranking of these environment templates, but looking at the outcome, there is clearly a sense that the panel this time preferred environment templates that addressed the whole range of the subject areas and looked to the links between library and information science on the one hand and Cultural and Media Studies on the other. It is unlikely that there will be more panels in the next REF - indeed there will probably be pressure to reduce costs by having yet fewer panels - so Digital Humanities centres and departments hoping to submit to the REF need to take all this into account.

While the disciplinary position of Digital Humanities as reflected in the REF might seem to be subject to some major challenges, in other ways the REF offers grounds for optimism. The REF web site offers some preliminary analysis of the different formats in research submitted to the REF. Not surprisingly, the message across the board is of the dominance of the book, chapters in books and above all the peer-reviewed journal article. Of the 215,507 outputs submitted overall to the REF, 157,021 were journal articles and 28,628 were books or chapters in books. The REF goes out of its way to ensure that research can be submitted in any format, but few institutions took advantage of this. There were 757 physical artefacts submitted, 1746 exhibitions and performances, 1684 other documentary outputs, and 553 others. The proportion of digital artefacts submitted to the REF was very small: just 761 altogether.

But if we look at just the outputs for Panel D, the panel that covered most of the arts and humanities, something very interesting emerges. Of those 761 digital outputs submitted to the REF, 674 or 88% were from the arts and humanities. In other words, it seems to be scholars in the arts and humanities who are more insistent that their work in digital media is central to their research. The overall output format figures from Panel D were 19527 books or chapters in books; 1707 exhibitions and performances; 874 other documentary formats; 731 physical artefacts; 674 digital artefacts; 471 other.

It does look as if it is scholars in the arts and humanities who are more likely to experiment with the format of their research and who are disseminating their research in digital form. I’ve made a cut-down version of the spreadsheet giving details of the digital REF outputs, and made it publicly available as a Google sheet. It’s a fascinating browse: not only are there very well-known projects, such as London Lives, the Newton project or EpiDoc, but also many less high-profile projects, and overall this list of pioneering digital research illustrates the variety and creativity in the field. As you browse through the list, you will see that there are issues in the classification which may suggest caution in interpreting these figures. For example, many recordings of musical performances because they were submitted on CD or DVD are categorised as digital artefacts, but I’m not sure they represent digital scholarship as we would understand it. On the other hand, many digital projects were submitted as scholarly editions which were included in the figure for printed books, so it's swings and roundabouts: here's a Google sheet of the scholarly editions.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that the arts and humanities is more digital than other disciplines - after all, many of those printed articles in the other STEM panels describe work on technologies which will enable future digital scholarship in the humanities - but there does seem to be a stronger engagement with digital methods of communicating research in the arts and humanities than elsewhere. Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder in their recent book for MIT Press, Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities likewise report the results of a 2009 survey of 426 humanities scholars, in which 98% considered digital tools useful and 83% considered themselves enthusiasts or advocates for digitisation. Eric and Ralph point out that, surprisingly, there is apparently more enthusiasm for digital methods among humanities scholars than among social scientists. Only 60% of a survey of social scientists considered digital tools useful, and a mere 33% described themselves as enthusiasts or advocates for digitisation. Eric and Ralph suggest that this is because humanities scholars have a closer engagement with primary materials and editions, a pattern that also seems to be echoed in the REF information.

As government cuts continue to bite, it will be necessary to increase our advocacy for the value of the arts and humanities. Maybe our pioneering of digital creativity and content deserves greater prominence in this advocacy than it has had hitherto.

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My Acts of Reading

Guest blog entry for the blog of the Digital Reading Network.  

In an earlier post on this blog, Sue Thomas asked us to consider where and how we read. She reminded us of Alberto Manguel’s comment that ‘the act of reading in time requires a corresponding act of reading in place, and the relationship between the two acts is inextricable’. Sue reflected that this sense of reading and place is being further transformed by the device we use when we read.

Many of my most vivid memories are associated with reading, from my mother teaching me to read before I went to school, to my father taking me as a child to the children’s library on Saturday morning and the terrifying moment as a first-year postgraduate when I first tried (and failed) to read a medieval document on my own, leaving me wondering what type of career I might eventually have. As it was, I mastered medieval handwriting and went on to work at the British Library. When I first saw the World Wide Web in 1993 (thanks to that remarkable man Tim Hadlow, then the British Library’s Systems Administrator), I immediately felt it would change everything. 

But it was really in the practice of writing that I first noticed the changes. By the time I left the British Library in 2000, I was already writing so little by hand that my handwriting (once a beautiful Italic hand) had deteriorated to illegibility, and I found the way in which universities are (still) so incredibly dependent on a bureaucracy of forms completed by hand a shock to the system. In 2000, I used the computer for writing, e-mail, keeping indexes on databases, looking at images, preparing Powerpoints and checking library catalogues, but not really for reading. Even when I was looking at images of manuscripts, I was viewing them more as objects than as texts to be read. It was from about 2003, as more and more academic journals were becoming available online, that I noticed that I was starting to read academic articles almost exclusively on my computer. This was part of a major and largely unstudied shift which John Regazzi has recently described in his book, Scholarly Communications: A History from Content as King to Content as Kingmaker. Humanities academics abandoned a default mode of checking bibliographies first, then monographs, then articles, and moved instead towards going first to journal articles, increasingly identified through Google. The shape, chronology and disciplinary spread of this change requires further investigation, but in my case there is no question that it turned my normal research procedure upside down.

I think this shift towards use of the online article reflects more than the unwillingness of an overweight academic to heave himself out of a comfortable chair and head to the library. It was about the easiest way of finding out the scholarly state of play on a particular subject. Using Google or a word search to find the most recent articles, and then using those articles as a gouging knife to dig out the key issues and literature on a subject is in many ways a more effective process than trying to work out the current state of play from monographs and printed bibliographies, both of which might be considerably out of date. By 2005, I found that, for my academic reading, most of my reading of journal articles was taking place online, but books were still read in the conventional way in bed, on buses, on trains and (for me) above all in libraries. I should perhaps explain that unlike many academics I have never built up a very carefully selected or extensive library. I’ve acquired many academic books over the years, but I suspect that for academic books this was more often than not a means of possessing books or authors I particularly admired, almost as trophies, rather than for use. I have always preferred to work in libraries, and have been lucky enough either worked in libraries or lived in close proximity to major libraries, so my working copies of academic books tend to be library copies. I am assisted considerably in this by having been a member for nearly forty years of the wonderful London Library, with its marvellously liberal lending policies.

The next change I noticed was in my relationship with newspapers. Newspapers have always been important to me, as a kind of neutral disengaged space of reading, where I can pretend to relate to the world but actually keep at bay (think of the prisoner Fletcher in Porridge whose reading of The Sun seemed to occupy large parts of the day, as if it was a means of both forgetting the prison and remembering the outside world. Not that I’ve ever felt a prisoner, but it reflects the wonderful way a newspaper can keep your brain in a pleasant neutral gear). My childhood days were punctuated by newspapers: the arrival through the letterbox in the morning; the newspaper vendors in cloth caps and mufflers selling a choice of three London evening newspapers in makeshift shelters at street corners on dark foggy winter nights. Reading a newspaper on the top deck of a bus remained a supreme pleasure for me until well into my 40s. Then it changed: I noticed I had stopped bothering with newspapers in the week (I’ve never been one for magazines). I think the combination of television, radio and the web meant that the pretence of reading it to keep up with current events had been stripped away. I became more conscious that I read newspapers purely as a relaxation activity, and somehow that seemed to be something more appropriate for the weekend. So I read newspapers nowadays on Saturday and Sunday, and will indulge myself with a large number - its one of the high spots of the week - but my relationship with this particular act of reading has profoundly changed.

But I remained stubbornly devoted to the book. I continued to read academic books, and my leisure reading was exclusively in old-fashioned printed book form. In Ceredigion, where I live, the excellent public library service is constantly under threat of cuts, and I like to support it. But I also loved pottering round Waterstones, and my essential pre-holiday preparation was a big book purchase, and as soon as I got on holiday, establishing a drip feed of good books was an essential requirement. I didn’t contemplate a Kindle or an iPad - until last year, I had only purchased one e-book, an academic book that I needed in a desperate hurry to complete some footnotes. Last summer, I was reading Mark Ormrod’s magisterial biography of Edward III in the Yale English monarchs series. Mark’s book is a remarkable piece of historical research, but it is 720 pages long. Carrying it around, with laptop and all the other paraphernalia of modern life, started give me nasty twinges in my back. It was clear that a 720 page biography of a king who reigned for fifty years was not something I could any longer contemplate easily reading on buses and trains.

I had acquired an iPad a few months earlier, and decided that the pain in my back necessitated a switch to an e-book, and acquired Edward III as an e-biography. It was one of the greatest revelations of my life. It wasn’t just that I no longer had to lumber around that huge brick of ink, paper and card, although that was a great relief. The clarity of the screen and the backlighting seemed somehow to make it easier to connect the book and for me definitely made the reading experience more intense. Far from the iPad getting in the way, I seemed to be able to connect with the e-book much more easily. I had the iPad to hand in odd moments when it would have awkward to get the large book out, so I made much quicker progress with the book. Then, after I had flown through Edward III at a rate which thoroughly surprised me, the convenience of getting the next book was just breathtaking. One of the saddest things in life is finishing a good book just as a bus journey is beginning and not then having something to read. But our rural buses in Ceredigion now have wi-fi, and I can get another e-book while the bus is trundling through the West Wales countryside.

My e-Edward III revelation rebooted my reading habits, and seemed to give my reading renewed enthusiasm and productiveness. Eventually, I crossed what I had previously considered the rubicon, and experimented with reading books on a smartphone. I was amazed once again. The phone offered even greater flexibility with no loss of engagement or clarity. The phone meant I could read in situations where previously it was difficult - I could see what a colleague meant when he said that he was able to read a French novel in a rush hour crowd in the tube, thanks to his phone. Indeed, once I began to read on the phone, it somehow came alive for the first time, and it has become more cemented into my life as a result.

Yet there is one fundamental area where my reading practices remain unchanged. My doctoral thesis was on the records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The three years I spent in the Public Record Office exploring medieval court records and assembling transcripts of the cases were among the most satisfying of my life. My transcription process became very set: a 2H pencil and narrow feint punched 10 x 8 writing paper. I wrote on both sides of the paper and put the archival reference on the top left hand corner of the recto of each page. My notes are probably still one of the most comprehensive collections of materials relating to the revolt, and it was the dream of somehow making all this available online that first drew me into the digital humanities. In a remarkable act of scholarly private enterprise, the legal historian Robert Palmer of the University of Houston has scanned many of the record series I worked on - over eight million images of medieval legal records - which are on a website called the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (www.allt.org). I could imagine nothing I would rather spend the rest of my scholarly career doing than exploring this amazing collection of material, and as a result I’ve recently been transcribing legal records again. 

But here’s the odd thing. Although I put it the images on my iPad, I find it very difficult to produce typed notes on them on my laptop, which seems to me what I should now be doing. Although I can read the records fluently enough, somehow I can only process the information in it if I transcribe it - ideally with a 2H pencil, although sadly nowadays I am compelled to use A4 paper. Why do I feel this need to transcribe to process information? Is it because I got into a habit of work and thought at the Public Record Office that I now am locked into? Is it is residual irreducible marker of my digital immigrant status? There are hints that, reassuringly, it isn’t just me. Ségolène Tarte, in studying the processes used by scholars studying papyri, has found that manual transcription is also important for them, and Ségolène has suggested psychological reasons why that might be the case. Younger colleagues at King’s College London who work extensively with digital images report that they also still regard old-fashioned transcription as an important part of their armoury, while Stuart Dunn tells me that pencil and paper are still indispensable tools in looking at old maps.

So, I think that a handwritten transcription will continue to be important in studying materials like my medieval court records. It will be the last bastion of my professional practice that will remain unchanged, although obviously the availability of Robert Palmer’s marvellous AALT resource does mean that I am not now tied to going to Kew to steep myself in this material.

What is striking about this process of reshaping my reading practice over the past twenty years is its piecemeal character. It has been a process of gradual renegotiation of my reading habits, according to taste, circumstance and back pain. A lot of current discussion of digital transformations assumes that it will be a sudden, dramatic and disruptive process. A lot of this rhetoric derives from the management theorist Clayton Christensen (and misinterprets Christensen’s work in my view). The supposed disruption of the music industry by online services is frequently taken as a warning of the fate that awaits book publishers, universities, etc., if they don’t get more switched on and digital. My own experience of changed reading practices suggests that a much more common experience of digital transformation is one of gradually shifting accommodation, experiment and realignment - a piecemeal process, not less profoundly transformative for that, but a quieter slower and more gentle process than the ‘disruptions’ digital enthusiasts sometimes loudly call for, without really thinking about what they are demanding.

Now, its time for bed, and a good book.

                            

          

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The Long, the Short and the Very Short

Whenever I look at newspapers from my youth - the 1960s and 1970s - I am struck by how much more reading there was in them - so many words and so much text, even in tabloid papers. It does seem to suggest that our attention span is getting smaller. Of course, it has been claimed that the internet is to blame for this, but I’m doubtful. And the contemporary taste for bite-size knowledge is actually more powerfully expressed in conventional academic print publication than in the digital sphere. The sad rise of handbooks, companions and encyclopaedias of every imaginable complexion and subject is one of the most unfortunate developments in academic publishing over the past twenty years. The editing of encyclopaedias seems to have become one of the great power-broking positions of modern scholarship. Although I have contributed to some of these companions and am contracted to edit a couple, I’m doubtful about their value. They fragment academic discourse, suggest wrongly that scholarship can be reduce to easily digested chunks, and give a distorted and sense of the scope and structure of particular subject areas. Yet the demand for them seems insatiable, presumably from time-pressed students who want to quickly master the subject without having to read more than the essentials. I wonder whether a great academic masterwork such as Thomas Tout’s Chapters in Medieval Administrative History, published in six volumes over seven years, and embodying a lifetime of archival scholarship, distilled into a powerful overarching thesis interpreting the whole history of later medieval England, would be feasible today - perhaps not. Would anyone read a work like Chapters in Medieval Administrative History if it appeared today, unless they had to do so for the REF?

One of the most striking manifestations of our current thirst for bite-sized and easily digested morsels of academic scholarship is Oxford University Press’s ‘Very Small Introduction’ series. The list of ‘Very Small Introductions’ currently available reads like the catalogue of a Wunderkammer - a random selection of knowledge ranging from American Politics to the Laws of Thermodynamics by way of Astrobiology, Medical Ethics and Spirituality. It’s an intellectual grab bag, a pick and mix of knowledge. But, having said that, the three ‘Very Short Introductions’ I have read (each one on a plane journey - are they intended as intellectual airport literature?) have been wonderfully written, beautifully crafted by their authors, who convey complex ideas in a stimulating and engaging fashion. Paul Strohm’s Very Short Introduction on ‘Conscience’ is a model of how to convey complex philosophical and cultural ideas in a way that is accessible to the widest audience and encourages you to find out more. In a completely different sphere, Nicholas Vincent’s Very Short Introduction to ‘Magna Carta’ clearly and concisely explains a complex historical phenomenon, while offering nuggets which are new even to experts in the field.

I have recently read with enthusiasm and admiration John H. Arnold’s Very Short Introduction to ‘History’, a massive and challenging undertaking accomplished with intellectual clarity, beautiful writing, engaging and wide-ranging scholarship, and presenting a liberal and nuanced view of what the writing of history entails and means. What particularly struck me about John’s Very Short Introduction was the way in which he placed primary sources - the letters, diaries, records and other materials which are our postcards from the past - at the heart of his discussion. Exploring, probing and debating the complexities, gaps and deceptions of these sources are the essence of history and the historian’s work, and John provides some inspired and memorable examples of this process. Many recent discussions on the nature of history have emphasised historiography, the debates among historians, as the chief focus of interest, but of course there is nothing more arid than reducing knowledge to the analysis of academic factions and disputes. John forcibly reminds us that history starts with the past and with the survivals we have from the past.    

It is very striking how the digital does not significantly figure in John’s overview. He uses the computerisation of tax records as an example of reading sources ‘against the grain’, but otherwise the digital does not appear. This might be taken as an illustration of the failure of historians to engage with contemporary changes in communication that Tim Hitchcock lamented in a provocative article in Culture and Social History on which Mark Knights, Ludmilla Jordanova and myself have discussed in a recent issue of the journal. But perhaps in a ‘Very Short Introduction’ it is reasonable not to give more attention to digital history - perhaps the digital has so far made little impact on the process of writing history.

However, historical sources are one area in which the digital is already having a profound impact on the way in which scholarship has to be conceived and conducted. Historans using the archives of the web being created by organisations like the Internet Archive or the British Library will inevitably have to approach these vast and volatile digital sources in a different way to Tudor state papers. An excellent example is one that Tobias Blanke gave me, and which I will have stop using as it is getting repetitive, is the e-mail archive of George W. Bush which contains 200 million e-mails. Historians of the Second Iraq War will not be able to explore this by reading it or doing keyword searches for Iraq. New methods will be required, which may increasingly be visual, haptic and quantitative.

Most of the examples of sources discussed by John Arnold are textual, but in a wonderful passage, he describes a source as ‘anything that has left us a trace of the past. It can be a charter, recording a land transfer; a court case, presenting the pleas of the witness; a sermon, given to an unknown audience; a list of books, shares, prices, goods, people, livestock, or beliefs; a painting or photograph of forgotten faces; letters or memoirs or autobiographies or graffiti; the buildings of the rich, displaying their power or wealth, or the building of the poor, displaying the opposite: stories, poems, songs, proverbs, dirty jokes, opaque marginal comments made by bored scribes or cunning glossators. A source can be a thousand things; it can be a discoloration of a page in an inquisitor’s manual, marked by the imprint of a thousand kisses made in ritual obeisance by those about to be examined. It is a trace of the past’ (pp. 60-1).

It seems to me that it is the ability of digital methods to support such a multi-faceted, pluralistic and liberal view of the range and nature of historical sources, and thus of historical inquiry, which is the reason why they are of such importance to historians. Using conventional techniques, it was enough for the historian to get to grips with the dusty written historical records so romantically described by Ranke, whose influence on our view of history John discusses very interestingly. Digital tools enable historians to break out of this tower of text, just as (according to John) they have broken out of the political tower in which Thucydides imprisoned them. Digital resources allow  historians to engage with an enormous range of sources from film through sound to material objects of all types, and offer the possibility of creating a more media rich history.

In my recent contribution to the Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production collection edited by Patrik Svensson, I tried to give some illustrations of the way in which our engagement with archives is changing and sought to show how historians have greater access to film and sound material which poses complex, and sometimes troubling, issues of interpretation. If someone comes to write another Very Short Introduction to History in twenty years time, they will find it difficult to better John H. Arnold’s discussion, but their discussion will perhaps be of multi-media history which is not only read but also moves, speaks and can be felt.

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