Yacks to Hacks, Should Historians Increasingly Code?

I felt old today, on account of visiting my old sixth form at Tapton High School.

For the last few years, the school has coordinated with the University of Sheffield to host a set of Humanities and Social Science Seminars. These are intended to offer Tapton students a flavour of what undergraduate programming looks like, in an informal space, between their usual lessons. It also offers a key opportunity for the university to strengthen its connections with schools in the area offering A-Level qualifications.

I pitched a Digital History presentation, mostly an overview of notable projects, both from our own Digital Humanities Institute and elsewhere, alongside some information about our course offering.

Interestingly, I had prepped for more humanities-related questions, such as whether historians already engage enough with the digital as a mode of dissemination, inquiry and analysis? Or what tensions emerge from narrow, traditional, historical approaches and large-scale data?

Instead, the students who attended were from STEM backgrounds - computer science, physics, mathematics, leading to a more technical conversation about OCR capability, the rise of LLMs; LiDAR, and photogrammetry. I expected enthusiasm, but the level of their technical understanding was truly impressive.

Before the talk, some GCSE students had gathered at the lecture theatre's doorway. They turned to Dr Harris, the organiser of the seminar series, and curiously asked him - 'Who're the hacks? Who're the yacks?' They then asked whether the talk was about Computer Science?

Both questions that the Digital Humanities, let alone myself in the space of an hour, have yet to adequately answer.

Thank you to Tapton High School and particulary Dr Harris for the warm welcome,

The script is below, with the slides accessible via Zenodo at: https://zenodo.org/records/19239435

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Introduction

I define myself as a ‘historian’, but others, even in my own department of History, Philosophy, and Digital Humanities, might see me otherwise … 

We have a stereotype of historians as more concerned with dusty archives than hard coding and software, however, I want to argue today that digital technology has influenced historians’ interpretation of the past for the last half century, really ever since computers became available.

Some historians agree, calling themselves ‘digital historians’, while others retain a wariness of using digital methods; some, in similar positions to mine, see themselves as primarily software developers or designers, and - increasingly - with the ‘AI boom’, the argument has even emerged that all historians will work digitally at some point. That all historians will become ‘digital historians’, and will have to use certain digital tools, even if they don’t code themselves. This has re-ignited the ‘hacks versus yacks’ debate, beginning around 2010: with the hacks building software, and the yacks discussing theory, with both camps struggling to find common ground.

I want to unpack this debate today, and ask you whether, in the 21st century, we should expect historians to code?

Some of your teachers might feel a rush of anxiety in hearing that, which is understandable, but I’m here to show that embracing technology as a historian is more natural than you think. Historians have often failed to recognise their own subject’s long background in using computers, often seeing technology as an add-on; instead, more ink is split on other ‘intellectual turns’, without thinking about the ‘digital turn’. Historians and computing have a shared history, worth remembering. 

What Do We Mean, ‘Historian?’ 

So, I’ve collected some ‘historians’ to begin with, hopefully you recognise a few of them. You’ve got David Olusoga, looking over a manuscript; Dan Snow, doing what Dan Snow does, which is walking across a field with purpose. But, what do historians actually do? What do we mean by ‘historian’? 

Historians research, analyse and interpret the past, extracting meaning and establishing patterns from evidence (Anderson, 2004: 81-82). This evidence is usually hard to find, in the ground or within the depths of an archive. Once found, a historian works with primary sources, eavesdropping on the past to construct arguments about what happened, and why we should care, weighing up evidence based on scraps of information (Galgano et al., 2008: 1-5, Devon et al., 2012: 122). 

Roy Rosenzweig, in 1997, one of the first ‘digital historians’, suggested that historians must focus on the past - after all they are ‘historians’, but in a way that responds to moments in our current society. We now live, for better or worse, in a digital society, one where having a computer monitor on your desk is normal, even within history departments, not weird - as it was in the 1980s. This follows Adam Crymble’s (2021) argument, in his book Technology and the Historian, that: ‘As we increasingly work with computers, computers will increasingly exert their influence on our intellectual agenda, and so we must understand both their strengths and the limits they impose on us’. This was said before recent AI news, which has made the need to understand technology even more pressing.  

So, maybe, it is incumbent on historians to think about technology, its development and, also, how it can be used to help discover more about our past, weigh up evidence and construct new arguments? 

That said, I am not advocating for more conventional historians, and the histories they write, to be replaced; but, instead, want to show you, through some real projects, that embracing technology can improve the practice of history. A lot of these tools are free, accessible, and easier to use than you may think, avoiding the expectation that historians build the next Google from scratch.

Some Examples

A lot of this work is not new, even though ‘technology’ often connotes shiny modern methods. This can easily lead us into a ‘perpetual future tense’, constantly talking about the next development, instead of the progress that has already been made. As such, I’ve decided to pick a range of examples, some more recent than others.

From September, this year, to July 2027, the Bayeux Tapestry will be loaned to the British Museum. I’m not sure if anybody has seen it firsthand in France, but the huge embroidered tapestry that depicts the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, is displayed along a wall, with a walkway in the middle. The British Museum has, instead, decided to do something different, alongside the usual display, using depth-perception cameras to run the tapestry across a 780 feet billboard using parallax imaging. You may not get an ‘arrow in your eye’ like King Harold, but this moves interpreting the physical material beyond a static, two dimensional, experience. 

3D Modelling

If you’re not convinced by such promotion, there are more traditional projects enabling historians to reconstruct aspects of the past in three-dimensional, virtual, ways. Here is an example from our own Digital Humanities Institute. Beginning in 2001, the Institute participated in a ground-breaking study to open visual windows onto Cistercian ways of life, as experienced by monks. Through 3D modelling, usually reserved for architectures, the DHI modelled key sites, including Fountains Abbey, across Yorkshire. This combined conventional and rigorous historical research, and advances in digital imaging, to reach a broader interested audience. The models used for this project are also free to download - https://www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/cistercians/.

Similar 3D modelling approaches have been used to model how 17th century ships operated in the water, using flow dynamics to measure how dynamic vessels were compared to more modern counterparts (Costiner, 2021). Such work tells history in new, dynamic, ways.

Automatic Transcription

As I mentioned, some of my own work uses AI to read manuscripts. This is important for historians, as such work can support ‘read aloud’ software, to make their contents more accessible for visually impaired researchers (Forget, forthcoming 2026). In other cases, historians work across hundreds, even thousands of documents, with limited time, while, perhaps, not being experts in a particular kind of handwriting - which is very hard to learn, so having an AI tool to help ease the load is sometimes called for.

These AI tools do not always require coding experience, with Transkribus (https://www.transkribus.org/) being one example of an AI software that enables historians to train their own models, tailored to specific projects. Automatic transcription has proven useful in identifying unknown authors, digitally preserving almost lost languages like ChuNom, the original script of Vietnam (Vu et al., 2021: 86), and finding new historical information, for instance mentions of a forgotten Rembrandt painting in the Amsterdam City Archives (Park, 2022).

Recognising Maps

Similar transcription work has also been conducted on maps, to form ‘spatial’ histories - histories across place and location, which show how people related to landscape, or potentially migrated across regions. Projects like Machines Reading Maps (https://machines-reading-maps.github.io/), which again the DHI was involved with, developed ways to make digital maps searchable and linked to other collections, increasing the possibility for historians to use map text as a primary source. This has also informed how libraries provide access to historical map content, seen here with the National Library of Scotland's interactive Map Viewer (https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/), which actually shows the location of my desk, where I wrote this presentation. Not the best use of the technology, but certainly shows how easy it is to adapt.

Historical Databases 

One - final - example to convince you that digital methods are useful to historians, and how an understanding of them is important for the next generation of scholars, is the Old Bailey Online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/), which runs on our Digital Humanities Institute server. The Old Bailey Online is a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,752 trials held at London's central criminal court, and 475 accounts of the lives of executed convicts. Through the scholarship of digital historians like Tim Hitchcock, it has emerged as an essential primary source for understanding the history of the legal system.

Technology, and Digital History, Are Not Perfect 

These examples show how technology can enable new kinds of history to be told, with historians playing a direct role in informing such systems - whether a massive database, or the use of 3D digital models. 

Should we expect all historians to become ‘digital’, possibly not; but all these examples rely on historical experts, you cannot model an abbey without that kind of knowledge. If historians don’t inform, or participate in, such work, what are we left with? A reliance on AI companies, outside of the field, to provide us with more, meaningless, content? 

Of course, technology is not perfect, any digital historian would agree, frustrated by a piece of software tapping out, or a code block breaking. Ewing et al. (2014) suggests that digital research demands historians ‘accept the ‘messiness’ of large amounts of data …’. Given the flood of data now being created everyday, especially with AI, the rhythms of our historical research are bound to change, with discovering key historical facts made even harder. 

Lastly, what is digitally useful depends on where historians are based, and the histories they research. What works for a historian of London, or Sheffield, may not work for Lima, or Siberia. 

As I suggested earlier, too often, technology is thought of in terms of progress, that it always gets better - this is called techno-optimism, and prevents us from properly critiquing the benefits and limitations of digital tools. However, as historians, we need to engage with the digital, if we are to change it for the better.

What We Offer at the University of Sheffield 

If you’re interested in these kinds of debates, around technology and history, the University of Sheffield offers a module in Digital History, led by Dr James Chetwood, an expert medievalist, particularly in using databases to better understand how person names change over time.

Here’s a little extract from his module introduction - 

‘The last 50 years have seen new digital technologies transform the ways in which historical research is conducted, presented and disseminated. This module will introduce you to key digital historical research methods – including digital mapping, social network analysis and data visualisation – and ask you to reflect on the impact these methods have had on the wider discipline of history. You will then get the chance to put some of these methods into practice yourself through a digital history project of your own.’

The Digital Humanities Institute also offers post-graduate teaching focused on how culture is shaped by digital practices, as well as offering more practical skills in terms of coding experience.

Feel free to reach out to me, at this email address, if you’d like to discuss what we do, and - more importantly - how we can support the kind of research YOU want to do.

References

Anderson, I. (2004). Are you being Served? Historians and the Search for Primary Sources. Archivaria. 58(August): 81-129. Available at: https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12479.

Costiner, L. (2021). A Digital Approach to Tracing Technology Innovation in Ship Design. Oxford A-Reality Hub. Available at: https://oxr.eng.ox.ac.uk/blog/shipproject/

Crymble, A. (2021). Technology and the Historian. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Devon, E., MacDougall, R., Turkel, W.J. (2012). New Old Things: Fabrication, Physical Computing, and Experiment in Historical Practice. Canadian Journal of Communication. 37(1):121-128. doi: 10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2506

Ewing, E.T., Gad, S., Hausman, B.L., Kerr, K., Pencek, B., Ramakrishnan, N. (2014). Blog post. Mining Coverage of the Flu: Big Data’s Insights into an Epidemic. Perspectives on History (AHA). Available at: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2014/mining-coverage-of-the-flu-big-datas-insights-into-an-epidemic.

Forget, E. (forthcoming 2026). Braille Character Recognition: The Study of Tactile Texts, in Melissa Terras, Paul Gooding, Joe Nockels, and Sarah Ames (eds.), Critical Approaches to Automatic Text Recognition. facet publishing: London. 

Galgano, M.J., Arndt, J.C., Hyser, R.M. (2008). Doing History: Research and Writing in the Digital Age. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.

Park, F. (2022). Amsterdam Notary Archives out of the dark. Transkribus blog. Available at: https://www.transkribus.org/blog/amsterdam-notary-archives

Vu, M.T., Le, V.L., Beurton-Aimar, M. (2021). IHR-NomDB: The Old Degraded Vietnamese Handwritten Script Archive Database. In: Elisa Bertino, Wen Gao, Bernhard Steffan, Moti Yong (eds.). ICDAR 2021 Document Analysis and Recognition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp. 85-99.