ABSTRACT
Traditionally, historians have gone to archives—up in the morning, off to the airport, flying across the country, or even an ocean, and physically sitting in a reading room. These research trips imposed a substantial bottleneck on the amount of primary source research that historians could do. All of this has begun to change in the past three decades with the widespread advent of digitized primary sources, a force that historians are beginning to realize (or should be, in any event) is fundamentally transforming their research. 1–3 This is a force that touches all historians, be they those who use volumes of digitized primary sources or even just those who use databases or other repositories to navigate newspaper articles or other print 66volumes. The new bottleneck increasingly relates to the consumption of this abundant information and performing analysis on it. 1 We used to be limited in the amount of time we could spend in an archive in Washington, DC, for example; now, we are limited in the amount of time we can spend sifting through all of this information online and making sense of it. New tools, methods, and scholarly frameworks are needed to deal with this material.
