History and Historical Methods
Written in collaboration with historian David Armitage, History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014) challenged the paradigm of the short time scale, in which history has largely been written in recent decades. In this book, Guldi and Armitage argued an urgent need for the longue-durée study of history—and proposed that both historians and civilization itself must embrace a long term perspective to understand the multiple pasts that brought us to our current troubled global state—and that this temporal broadening of perspective will be required for survival on our troubled planet.
Along with a great deal of her more recent work, this collaboration with Professor Armitage represents a profound and on-going reflection upon the many methodological approaches to the long durée study of history. In her most recent monograph, Long Land War (to be published at Yale University Press in 2022), she has explored how this long term history can support the governance of climate change, and other crucial issues of our times.
Professor Guldi is currently working upon a new book, Dangerous Art of Text Mining, that explores in greater detail both the dangers and exciting potential of a hybrid methodology that reconciles the powerful approaches of digital technology with the sober and nuanced approaches of traditional historians. This book will examine a variety of modern and traditional theories of history, while showing how they can inspire new quantitative approaches of the data sciences, including a nuts and bolts approach to building algorithms nuanced enough to illuminate the complexities and ambiguities of human experience, and multiple temporal dimensions, and expand the practical applications of text mining and natural language processing (NLP).
This contemplative reflection on how one asks historical questions is a thread that runs throughout her work—and in many ways, Roads to Power (Harvard 2012) and “The Spatial Turn” represent early exercises in exploring spatial theories from a dozen different disciplines and their intersections. She has applied her on-going reflections upon historical methodology especially in the domain of British history, making probing investigations into state making, national formation, and spatial analytics.
Relevant Articles and Talks
“The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities, May 13, 2021. Video here.
May 2021 - talk - University of Manchester - "The History Manifesto, Revisited?"
Roundtable, Digital Methods in Legal History, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt, March 1-5, 2021.
Keynote, Title TBD, Conference on Digital History, University of Umeå, December 2021.
“Critical Search,” John Hopkins Workshop in Digital History, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, July 31, 2020.
The Measures of Modernity, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR HISTORY, CULTURE AND MODERNITY
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Keynote, Computational Text Analysis and Historical Change, Umeå, Sweden, Sep. 4, 2019.
“Measuring World View,” Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn, Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2019.
(with Ben Williams) “Synthesis and Large-scale Textual Corpora: A Nested topic model of Britain’s Debates overlanded Property in the Nineteenth Century,” in Current Research in Digital History 1:1 (2018): http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-01-synthesis-and-large-scale-textual-corpora/. Includes code, data, and tool.
“The Missing Genres of Digital Argumentation in Historical Journals,” Panel on Argumentation in Digital History, American Historical Association, Washington, DC, January 6, 2018.
Talk, “Argumentation in Digital History,” George Mason University, September 15-6, 2017.
Plenary Talk, “Fastlanes and Potholes on the Road to the Future of Digital History,” Aalto University, Helsinki, June 2, 2017.
(with David Armitage) ‘The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,’ American Historical Review, 120, 2 (April 2015): 543–54.
Presentation, “Introducing Paper Machines,” Princeton University workshop on Digital History, March 27, 2015.
Roundtable on digital history, Harvard History Department, March 2013.
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on Digital Humanities, University of Indiana Urbana Champagne, May 21, 2021
“The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities, May 13, 2021. Video here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/cMiKw386_DU/edit
Oct 2020 - Stanford - CESTA conference - Digital Humanities
Jan 2019 - Then & Now - Short-termism, Metanarratives and the History Manifesto
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.
“The Digital Humanities in 2025” and “An Introduction to Topic Modeling,” keynotes for the Digital Humanities Road Tour, various universities across Finland, January 27-February 3, 2018.
“Discussion of the History Manifesto,” University of Swansea, Wales, February 8, 2018.
“Methods Intensive: Towards a Method of Textmining for Historical Analysis,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, November 17-8, 2016.
“The History Manifesto,” participation in dedicated roundtable hosted by the Washington History Seminar, Co-sponsored by the AHA, April 20, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” Annenberg Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, February 17, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” presentation at the Kennedy School, comments by Sam Moyn, Harvard University, February 12, 2015.
“A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.
“The History Manifesto,” talk in the British Government series, London School of Economics, October 8, 2014.
“The History Manifesto,” talk at the History Department, University of California, Berkeley, September 29, 2014.
“Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Institute of Historical Research, Digital Humanities Seminar, October 7, 2014.
Oct 2014 - University of London - IHR Digital History Seminar - talk - Introducing Paper Machines
Oct 2014 - University of London - IHR Digital History Seminar - discussion - Introducing Paper Machines
“Front Lines: Early-Career Scholars Doing Digital History,” American Historical Association, January 4, 2013, http://aha.confex.com/aha/2013/webprogram/Session8898.html, http://storify.com/JohnOKDC/aha-2013-session-111-front-lines-early-career-scho
May 2012 - Northwestern University - "Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students"
“Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7rumSNPw8
“The History of Walking and the Digital Turn: Stride and Lounge,” Journal of Modern History 84:1 (March 2012), 116-144.
“The Other Side of the Panopticon: Technology, Archives, and the Difficulty of Seeing Victorian Heterotopias,” Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 1:3 (2011): 1-25. Link
Nov 2014 - Columbia-SOFHeyman - A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age
Sept 2014 - Cambridge University Press - An Interview with David Armitage and Jo Guldi, authors of The History Manifesto
May 2012 - Northwestern University - "Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students"
May 2012 - Northwestern University - "Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students"
"Digital Methods and the Long Land War," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://digihist.se/2012/12/13/jo-guldi-om-digital-historia/
“Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7rumSNPw8
Various talks to graduate students on digital methods, University of Chicago, 2008-11