The Problem of Abundance: Information Overload in Contemporary Archives
When the archive holds everything, historians must rethink what thoroughness actually means.
The Globalization of Archives: Multi-Site Research Methods
When your sources are scattered across continents, how do you write honest global history?
NGO Archives and the New Geography of Historical Sources
NGOs document what states never could—but their fragile archives demand new methods from historians
Writing History Before It's Over: The Methodology of Ongoing Events
How do historians write about events that haven't ended, analyzing decisions made in uncertainty we still share?
Quantifying Qualitative Sources: Mixed Methods in Contemporary History
When computers read millions of documents, who decides what the data means?
How Diplomatic Cables Transformed Contemporary International History
When a quarter million cables dropped, historians gained unprecedented access—and unprecedented methodological problems to solve.
Studying Surveillance: When the State's Records Are About Everyone
When archives were built for control, not understanding, historians must develop new methods to extract truth from instruments of oppression.
The Witness Protection Problem: Anonymity in Contemporary Oral History
When the most important witnesses cannot be named, how do historians build credible accounts of sensitive recent events?
The Video Archive Revolution: YouTube as Historical Source
How algorithmic curation, verification challenges, and platform instability are reshaping contemporary historical methodology
The Email Problem: Personal Digital Archives as Historical Sources
Why the most documented era in history may leave future historians with critical gaps in the archival record
Studying Disinformation: How Historians Approach Deliberate Falsehood
Extracting historical meaning from deliberate falsehood without becoming its unwitting amplifier
The Photograph Explosion: How Digital Imaging Changes Visual History
When billions of images document every moment, photography's truth-telling power transforms into something historians must learn anew.
Oral History in the Age of Recording: How Technology Changes Memory
Recording technology promised to preserve memory perfectly. Instead, it created an entirely new relationship between testimony, performance, and the past.
Why Contemporary History Requires Different Source Criticism
Traditional source criticism assumes scarcity and archival silence—contemporary historians face abundance, living contestation, and institutional forgetting that demand fundamentally different methods.
Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Historical Practice
Computational methods are reshaping historical inquiry—demanding new skills, enabling new questions, and forcing the discipline to reconsider its fundamental practices.
Corporate Archives and the Privatization of Contemporary History
When crucial historical evidence sits in archives no scholar can access, how do we write honest histories of corporate power?
When Primary Sources Lie: Digital Manipulation and Historical Verification
How deepfakes and doctored documents are forcing historians to rebuild authentication from the ground up.
The 24-Hour News Cycle as Historical Source: Methodological Challenges
Why historians must decode the distortions embedded in continuous news coverage before treating it as reliable evidence of our era.
The Twitter Archive Problem: Why Social Media Creates Historiographical Nightmares
Social media archives vanish through corporate decisions, distort through algorithmic curation, and overwhelm through sheer scale—reshaping what future historians can know about us.
Writing History Without Archives: How Historians Navigate Classified Documents
When crucial documents remain classified, how do historians reconstruct the past—and how confident should we be in their conclusions?
How Economic Data Became Historical Evidence: The Quantitative Turn's Legacy
From cliometrics to digital humanities: understanding when numbers illuminate history and when they obscure what matters most.