A Hybrid Dissertation

Although digital dissertations remain uncommon in most history programs, they are part of an approach to historical scholarship that has been gaining recognition and acknowledgement throughout the field for at least thirty years. In Writing History in the Digital Age (2013), Sherman Dorn listed digital history projects ranging in date from the 1990s through the 2000s that used various technologies and formats including CD-ROMs, Google Maps, and Omeka.330 The presence of digital scholarship projects in humanities, history, and public history has increased dramatically in a few decades. Between 2007 and 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities has awarded over $66 million in funding for over 600 projects, including over $11 million for 117 projects in the history category.331 In the emerging field of pedagogical approaches to teaching history in the digital age, history scholars and instructors like Mills Kelly are exploring “how the remix culture developing around and through new media is making it possible for our students (and us) to produce either new knowledge about the past, or old knowledge presented in new ways.”332

Across the discipline, faculty and students collaborate in classrooms on innovative pedagogical experiments that involve learning about history while contributing to ongoing projects that reach wide audiences, providing students with experiences that reflect the changing nature of scholarly work. Students studying Atlanta’s history with Dr. Marni Davis at Georgia State University contribute to The History of Our Streets, which documents the history of the Georgia State campus and surrounding downtown neighborhoods.333 In the Public History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), multiple cohorts of students in a local history research methods course have worked with curator Dr. Christopher Cantwell and staff at UWM Libraries to produce Gathering Places: Religion & Community in Milwaukee, “a living archive of Milwaukee’s places of worship.”334 These kinds of collaborations provide students an opportunity to learn about the past and engage with historiographical perspectives while contributing to a larger history project with a public audience, better preparing them for scholarly careers in the digital age.

From the moment I decided to focus my dissertation on the experiences of women like Elizabeth Campbell, I felt that the only way to present their stories was through a digital dissertation that would allow visitors to read my analysis and interpretation alongside the documents, images, data, and spatial context that represents their lives. At the time, no PhD candidate in history at George Mason University had ever built or defended a digital dissertation but the faculty, staff, and students of the department were working to create that opportunity for future dissertations. The early decision to focus on a digital dissertation was based on my experience working with digital technologies that afforded opportunities to expand how history is presented. Since that time, I have completed the traditional historical scholarly training and entered a career as a digital scholarship librarian where my daily work involves asking how technologies can be applied to scholarly questions. These additional experiences have confirmed and strengthened my view that digital technology has much to offer to the practice of historical scholarship. As a result, this hybrid dissertation contributes to historical understanding of the past as well as current conversations about how historical research is conducted and presented. I argue that historical scholarship at all levels—even dissertations—can benefit from technologies that facilitate engagement with source materials, exploration of content in linear or non-linear paths, interaction with layered representations of space, time, and stories, and explication of the work that underlies historical research and presentation in the digital age.

The digital components of this project have two interconnected purposes: first, they serve to visualize data compiled from source material and facilitate analysis and representation. In “Doing and Making History: History as Digital Practice,” Jim Mussel argued

It is the role of historians to make absent contexts tangible, to make the imagined virtual, in order to reconstruct the significance of material from the past. Digital technologies provide powerful instruments that do just this, transforming material so that it can function in new environments, exposing both unrealized aspects of this material and the unthought assumptions that have hitherto structured our engagement with it.335

In this project, some visualizations serve as analytical tools that provide a unique insight into the data. For instance, the network diagram of claimants and witnesses helped identify patterns within the Niagara District communities that were not apparent in the reading of individual claim documents. In other cases, visualizations aid in representing complex data that is difficult to describe in long-form prose. The interactive maps and timelines in this project bring together different elements to show how inhabitants’ lives were affected by both time and space. In both of these roles, the network diagram and maps are presented alongside analytical and contextual commentary to help readers and visitors understand the data and the interpretations built into each representation. Additionally, the visualizations are connected with source material, which facilitates further exploration and potential for new insights. One of the drawbacks of print publication is that data and source material can be represented only in extremely limited forms such as static images, tables, and appendices.336 This project makes source material and corresponding datasets available in a variety of forms that offer starting points for comparisons and future investigations.

The second purpose of the digital components of this project is to make visible parts of the research and writing process that are often unmentioned or obscured in traditional forms of publication. My work aligns with Sherman Dorn’s argument that “public presentations of history in the digital age reveal the extent of that ‘preargument’ work, often in an explicitly demonstrative fashion or allowing an audience to work with evidence that is less directly accessible in a fixed, bound presentation.”337 In addition to making an original contribution to our understanding of the past and contextualizing its findings in relation to other histories, this project also describes the process of collecting, manipulating, transcribing, and transforming the war loss claim records into a digital collection and various datasets while also making the final products available for visitors to explore further. These kinds of activities—collecting, organizing, and transcribing source materials—have long been a part of historical scholarship but rarely receive substantial attention in the traditional forms of publication.

Digital history involves new tools and techniques for accomplishing this work and also affords opportunity to make evident the work that historians do to make the past accessible and interpretable. This Technical Module includes a section about processing Library and Archives Canada (LAC) materials that describes how documents written in the early nineteenth century have been made available in digital form on the project website. Furthermore, even though the project focuses primarily on the lives of women in Niagara and the materials they submitted to the Board of Claims for Losses, the entire collection of records and transcriptions is available on the project site and allows for future work to build on the same set of materials without requiring replication of the processing stages. This also allows for researchers and genealogists to access materials related to families in Upper Canada that have never been previously transcribed. Historians also have a responsibility to participate in the long-term preservation of materials in collaboration with library professionals, so the entire collection of records, separated into the more navigable series, has been submitted back to Library and Archives Canada.338


  1. Sherman Dorn, “Is (Digital) History More than an Argument about the Past?,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, Digital edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 27.↩︎

  2. These figures were generated using downloaded Excel spreadsheets of search results from the Funded Projects Query Form provided by the NEH. The first figure includes all projects in the Office of Digital Humanities category; the second figure includes the additional filter of all projects classified under “History: All.” https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/#↩︎

  3. T. Mills Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 12. See also sections on teaching in Toni Weller, ed., History in the Digital Age (New York: Routledge, 2013) and Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds., Writing History in the Digital Age, Digital edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).↩︎

  4. The History of Our Streets, accessed June 13, 2021, http://sites.gsu.edu/historyofourstreets/.↩︎

  5. Gathering Places: Religion & Community in Milwaukee (Public History Program, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), accessed June 13, 2021, https://liblamp.uwm.edu/omeka/gatheringplaces/.↩︎

  6. Jim Mussell, “Doing and Making: History as Digital Practice,” in History in the Digital Age, ed. Toni Weller (New York: Routledge, 2013), 89.↩︎

  7. For example, George Sheppard analyzed the war loss claims in the mid 1990s using computer-aided analysis software called Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) but represented that work in a series of tables and charts that obscure the underlying data. As a result, it is difficult to examine or address the assumptions made in his creation of the dataset. See the section on sources in the introduction to this project for more on Sheppard’s work. See also Appendix C in George Sheppard, Plunder, Profit, and Paroles: A Social History of the War of 1812 in Upper Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 256.↩︎

  8. Dorn, “Is (Digital) History More than an Argument about the Past?,” 27.↩︎

  9. The processed collection is available online but is still rather difficult to navigate. Board of Claims for War of 1812 losses [textual record, architectural drawing], RG19-E-5-a, Library and Archives Canada, http://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.redirect?app=fonandcol&id=139215&lang=eng↩︎

A Hybrid Dissertation