Like all historians, I’m interested in the stories people tell that help document change and continuity over time. Like most digital historians, I explore these stories using a variety of digital tools and new methods. When digital historians make use of tools and methods developed by other disciplines for our analytical and presentational projects, we inherit the priorities and norms of those disciplines. My goal is to prioritize history’s disciplinary norms as the foundation for the design of digital-history tools and methods. My research trajectory as a digital historian, then, is focused on the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and historical methods. That research output takes four primary forms, from which I draw to articulate the individual elements of six major research projects:

1. digital-tool and historical-method design with a variety of partners
2. analytical digital-history projects in collaboration with other historians using digital tools and methods
3. digital public engagement projects in collaboration with academic and non-academic communities using digital tools and methods
4. digital-humanities capacity-building and scholarly-communications research that explores how to better incorporate digital tools and methods into the academy

Past Accomplishments

My research has been supported by $2.25 million in grant funding (2 NSF and 2 private-foundation grants) and includes digital-history tool design (Net.Create), digital public history endeavors (History Harvests and community archives), and argument-driven digital-history research (Sutton & Craig, DHQ 2022; Craig & Diaz, AHR, forthcoming). Each of my digital-history projects integrates digital-history tool design and methods development in different measure and with various collaborators that extend the impact of my work to other subfields within history as well as beyond the field of history.

Future Work

Several in-progress projects extend one or more of the 4 strands of my research. The first fully integrates the collaborative work that Mixed-Method Approaches to Collaborative History has enabled, the humanities-focused network analysis that Net.Create offers, and my digital-humanities capacity-building research; planning for this Net.Create grant started in May of 2023 for a planned submission in October of 2023. The second is to take version 4.0 of the Community-Archive Template, which will be complete by the end of summer 2023, into new communities; two such community-archiving days are already scheduled for late October 2023 and I’m leading a team of historians, digital humanists, and librarians submitting an NSF Office of Digital Humanities Institute-of-Advanced Studies grant due for submission in August of 2023. Finally, I’m aiming to move the Global Middle Ages Pilgrimage out of IUB’s web platform and into an independent digital-public-history exhibit using an adapted version of the Community-Archive Template, bringing my medieval and digital-public-history skillsets together to make a scholar-sourcing platform for a new Global Middle Ages Pilgrimage that can be modified, adapted, added to, and localized for anyone interested in making medieval studies more publicly accessible.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the American Historical Association for their Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians, which ask historians to “consider new modes and forms of intellectual work within the discipline and to expand their understanding of what constitutes the discipline accordingly…, including new digital short-form genres such as blogs, social media or multimedia storytelling, developing and using new pedagogical methods, participating in strong activist forms of open-access distribution of scholarly work, or creating digital platforms and tools as alternative modalities of scholarly production.”

Thanks to Sharon Leon and Kathleen Fitzpatrick for their pioneering models of the public-dossier format; to my clinical-promotion committee for guiding my first public dossier; to Rebecca Wingo, whose more recent public dossier helped guide the restructuring of this dossier to focus on research; and to my tenure-case committee for helping shape this dossier.