ABSTRACT

I blog. I tweet. I email. I log in, search, sort, browse, download, type, copy, paste, hyperlink, delete, type again. Strange to say, then, that until recently, I had not considered myself to be a ‘digital historian’. A social, cultural, and medical historian certainly, but not digital. As I began to contemplate how I might begin to shape my research project on the history of migraine into a book I realised that the sources that I had found, read and worked with online had changed the scope of the project, my understanding of the people in the past about whom I wrote, and the possibilities for the shape of the historical narrative that would result. Of course, all projects develop in ways that cannot be envisaged at the start, but the availability of digitised material has sent a project that I had initially conceived as modern in scope, creeping ever further back through the centuries. A stream of highly fragmented, but extremely rich sources, has recently become navigable through online catalogues, digitisation projects and Google searches. Alongside the archival research in medical collections that is at the heart of the project, images of glittering medieval and early-modern manuscripts – now freely available in high resolution – have repeatedly demanded my attention.