Phrasing history: Selecting sources in digital repositories

Abstract

In recent years, mass digitization has opened up voluminous text corpora to human interpretation. Full-text search lets historians now find new sources that can change their understanding of thoroughly studied historical episodes. At the same time, it forces scholars to access historical sources in a new way: through specific words. This article analyses the consequences of this new way of accessing sources and investigates which search technologies are best suited for historical source selection in digital repositories. It argues that to seize the opportunities that digitization offers, historians must refine their search technologies so that they are based on words but are less dependent on exact phraseology.