The History Manifesto
The author's central theses are how historian should incorporate in new humanities and social sciences issues such as the claimed changes, technology, and economics revelation and how historians can make a difference in the digital age. Also, there is a debate on how they can activate digital archives to help in solving human problems. They found that for over 50 years historians were never involved in the long-term inquiry in the research matters and the historical studies are weak and traditional. Therefore, they have to include digital methods and experiments from their colleagues to help analyze the information. The book also mentioned tools and applications that can help to conduct and collect the data effectively. “Google Ngrams” is one of the applications that can support the data with “distant readings” that help the investigator to interpret the data and the results. Moreover, the writers illustrate “Paper Machines is an open-source extension of Zotero” (Armitage and Guldi, 2014, p.90) as a useful tool to pull down all history bibliography and build a collaborative database. This database will be a reference for all the scholars who would like to probe in history.
Big data and how this concept is playing a big part since the web.2.0 started is a controversial issue for the social sciences researchers. The authors explain the big data from a point that since we have massive numbers of data on a scale that we cannot go over and companies such as Google has taken the obligation of collecting the data as well as using it for many political matters. That can bring the humanitarian crises which result in both inequalities, and the reality of systems of governance.
In terms of what makes this publication and the scholarly discourse surrounding it so unique is the reference to the editors of the American Historical Review Exchange that the authors were curious about society’s and the scholars’ feedback. Thus, they enjoyed the conversation from many social media platforms including Twitter’s threads. The book was translated into seven languages which are a vast number comparing to the time that the book came out in. Furthermore, there is a privilege of the publisher’s reputation as Cambridge University Press.
Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler challenge the books' data-driven claims or findings on various grounds. First, the two reviewers point out issues of the American History Review (AHR) document on the foundation of the empirical commotion witnessed in the entire work (Clavert, 2014). The primary source of the disagreements is experientially stemming from conclusions regarding the significant data sources of dissertations, books and journal articles. The main concern is on the reliability of the sources highlighted where there they are raising questions regarding titles; whether they are an indicator of the chronological scope of the works.
Another pertinent issue is in view of the ‘Chronicle’ report on the data presentation and interpretation. Cohen and Mandler argue that the manifesto presented employed some of the force in the arguments concerning the short-termism of academic history since they were in dire need of inventing a crisis of short-termism in the field of history that could enable them to point clearly in the direction of the ‘longue duree.’ The two critics maintain their argument by pointing out that the big data is inadequate in its form and content during the presentation in the book since it has left out historical researchers who have no access to vast quantities of data as well as the challenges encountered by the historians in gathering and acquiring the big data.
I find the criticism regarding the big data justified based on the claims put forth by the reviewers. There is every reason for doubting the sources of information concerning the big data as it is not clear if the titles of the references are indicators of a chronological presentation of the works addressed in the book. Finally, the data is not reliable in the current form since the statistics from historical researchers with limited access to vast sums of figures as also the drawbacks experienced by the researchers while gathering data has been ignored.