ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the growing impact of computer use on the nature and importance of regional and local history. The first significant expansion of computer-aided historical research in Britain occurred in the 1960s. Computers enable greater cross-checking of reconstitution results with other sources. Later nineteenth- and twentieth-century material at local level survives in quantity that computers have an even bigger role to play in expediting a level and range of information extraction which was previously impossible. Computers can aid the interrogation or national bodies or data for local and regional research. The use of computers has revolutionised the prospects for local and regional history and the role which research at these levels may play in the future broader development of the discipline of economic and social history. The detailed knowledge generated by computer-aided projects both facilitates and necessitates a wide range of new ethnographical and anthropological approaches.
