Although I had used many primary sources before in my undergraduate work they were mostly sources in translation or transcription and thus this project was the first time I got to work (almost) directly with the sources, which were mainly Victorian newspapers. I would have to say that being able to see the originals (even in scanned form) brought a sense of immediacy and immersion, which is one of most exciting aspects of being a historian. It is quite exciting to know that so many historical documents can be viewed in its original form now online, which opens up many new avenues for inquiry. However, I do believe that with digitized collections, new issues and problems will need to be addressed. A significant issue in this new digital age that should be considered is the use of keyword searches, which is a large component of this project. For this project, I simply put in the term “Whitechapel” into the search engine and processed the results. For the British Newspaper Archives (BNA), this method brought well over 2000 pages of results. This may seem like a large number of articles focused on Whitechapel, but I discovered a large number of these articles were actually advertisements for whitechapel carts, which did not relate to the neighbourhood of Whitechapel itself. Furthermore, there appears to have been a Whitechapel in Liverpool, which further augmented the search numbers. These examples demonstrated for me some of the problems that using a search engine could have on research results. Although the Whitechapel in Liverpool was quite easy to identify and exclude, a more careless or less observant researcher could have easily mistaken it for Whitechapel, London. I only caught on to this fact because articles mentioning Whitechapel, Liverpool were discussing streets I was unfamiliar with (having worked on the London Times first I had fairly good knowledge about the major streets) and further digging revealed that there was a Whitechapel in Liverpool. Thus, as historians we have to recognize that technology is a great tool, but our own intuition and observation skills are equally important in picking up what machines cannot do. In the future, with the possibility that programs can be designed to count frequencies of words in a collection (I wouldn’t be surprised if something of the sort is already being designed and tested), I wonder how this problem of relevance can be overcome? The problem with the Whitechapel carts and Whitechapel, Liverpool clearly demonstrates that keyword searches can be problematic.
Another reservation I have with keyword searching are the blinders that it could place on our understanding of the period. A vivid example I remember was an article from 1885 on the Tower Bombing Case. Interested in the surrounding articles, I decided to peruse some surrounding articles before moving on. It seemed that the most important news item was not the Tower Bombing investigation (which had been reported on for several days already), but that of the death of General Gordon at Khartom. Had I not looked around, I would not have known of the other issues the Victorians faced on that particular day. True, the large quantity of articles surrounding the Tower Bombing in January to February of 1885 demonstrates the significance and interest the Victorians had, but I still have the feeling that I am missing something. A keyword search affects the flow of research and is very different from going to the physical archives and combing through the stacks and stacks of papers. But how can we know for sure that quantity represents significance? Victorian papers add a further wrinkle by not always putting the most important articles near the front (e.g. the Times, who’s first page consists solely of advertisements). In the end, history itself is an attempt to complete a puzzle with missing pieces, and thus digital history finds the same epistemological issues that has pestered other fields of history for a very long time. Yet, I am quite excited about the new possibilities and effects digital tools will have on the humanities as a whole.
Although I have outlined some reservations about digital history’s methods and practices, I still find that this is the most exciting and promising field as technology radically transforms our discipline. This project, for example, would have been impossible without keyword searches. The digitization of history is the biggest change to the dissemination of knowledge since the invention of the printing press. Digital tools allow for collaborative work which may change the relatively solitary workflow of the historian. OCR allows for rapid searching of archives and allows one scholar to do the work of many (imagine if we had to use a team of RAs combing though thousands of newspapers just to look for “Whitechapel”!) The use of digital tools (even something as simple as email) has already changed the way history is practiced, as knowledge can be transferred nearly instantaneously, and there will definitely be more changes in the future.
On specific aspects of the research I did, I found it very interesting to examine the development of a single neighbourhood in London at the end of the nineteenth century through newspapers alone. It very much gave a feel on how day to day life was for Londoners, what their concerns were, and how they perceived their fellow Londoners. My work on the BNA gave me quite a thorough knowledge of life in the neighbourhood from 1885 to July 1887. One of the more interesting trends were the philanthropic endeavors of the middle and upper classes of London for Whitechapel. These endeavors were embodied by several royal visits to key institutions such as the London Hospital and the Working Lads’ Institute. The most significant royal visitor was none other than Queen Victoria herself, who visited the neighbourhood and surrounding areas in the summer of 1887 to open the People’s Palace. The royal family did leave its mark on the neighbourhood (perhaps that is one of the reasons Prince Albert Victor had at one time been suspected to be the Ripper), and I think that these visits embodied the spirit of upper-middle class philanthropy. Smaller organizations, such as the Metropolitan Garden Association, strove to represent this as they attempted to provide for less fortunate Londoners. Yet this philanthropy did seem to be a hobby, or a way to be seen in high society. The aforementioned Garden Association wrote articles that made it seem that open spaces would revolutionize the health and wellbeing of Whitechapelers. However, from my research on the period after 1888 (after the Ripper murders) I cannot recall any more royal visits. Philanthropy seemed to lose its status as being an upper class hobby and was passed on to more radical institutions, most notably the Salvation Army. I am of course merely speculating from what I have read so far, but I think the issue of philanthropy and how it was administered seemed to change greatly after the Ripper murders, and this is definitely something that could be examined further.