As an amateur historian in early church/Mediterranean history the imaging tech used to "open" heavily damaged scrolls, just makes me giddy. Last May, some of the dead sea scrolls were read for the first time and they were awesome.

It works by taking x-ray and Infared images of the scrolls and creating a 3d model. Then the computer unfold it and somehow the initial image captured the writing and a translator unlocks the secret of the words.

I'm not sure how close we are to being able to safely excavate it, but Chinese archeologists have identified the tomb of the first emperor of China. When it's excavated it will be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, finds in the history of archeology. Much respect to those archeologists who have the patience to not open it up in order to preserve the contents.

Source:https://www.livescience.com/22454-ancient-chinese-tomb-terracotta-warriors.html

X-rays allow us to read the charred remains of rolled-up papyri from Herculaneum that would disintegrate if you tried to unroll them.

Unfortunately, all second rate Stoic philosophy or fragments of rhetorical handbooks.

In all seriousness, for me the most spectacular finds are almost invariably come from marine archaeology because that is the only time you get something like a real "snapshot". There are some very well preserved terrestrial sites, places like Pompeii and Vindolanda, but even there you are really looking at a picture of abandonment, despite the tourist brochure they are not "frozen in time" (or rather, if they are "frozen" it was not on an ordinary day). A shipwreck, though, really can be "as it was". Unfortunately the Mediterranean is a really terrible sea for preservation because of wood eating worms, which is why I am really excited about increased exploration in the Black Sea. The absolutely spectacular discovery of a classical Greek ship last year (?) may only be the start.

On a somewhat longer time scale, the development of techniques allowing more information to be extracted from bones is incredibly exciting, revolutionary in a way that can be in the same conversation as carbon dating. In particular, dental analysis that (put simply) shows where someone was born has already entered pretty decidedly into discussions about mobility in the ancient world.

This is the exact opposite of what you're asking for:

but I'm worried that (in the long-term) technology is eroding both the skills and the "perspectives" of historians.

To give a few examples:

• digitization of 19th century magazines make them word-searchable...! Which is great, right??! ... but now my undergrads and even grad students rely on word-searches... which means they do NOT page through the 19th c. magazines themselves. Which means that they miss huge opportunities that I had. (I found really fantastic material, which turned into articles and chapters, based on things that I was NOT looking for, but crossed paths with in my search for other things.) But more importantly, with a focused text-search, you miss encountering what people in the 19th c. were actually reading... It decontextualizes the material you "find" and deploy. And you lose out on all of that wider-'education' you used to get from time-consuming, page-by-page searching. So, today, I'm seeing young grad students who have stronger material for their "focus" (their dissertation research) than I did, but are basically clueless about the bigger picture into which that material fits. They're shocked when I make broad observations about what people were reading/seeing... because they can't imagine how I "know" that. Because they have not wasted/spent/enjoyed the year+ of time flipping through "irrelevant" material.

• same with tools like Google N-Grams. It's sort-of interesting, I guess. But if you really know the material--i.e. you've read deeply in 19th century literature in any specific topic--you realize how totally useless N-grams are for that topic. Like, completely useless. Tells you literally nothing.

• Or with archives: digitization of certain archival material is making other archival material, oddly, less visible. Because as historians (grad students and professors alike) are able to do more research from their desks, then they visit archives less and less... which means that there is a far lesser chance of fortuitously stumbling on a find that is truly original. The vast (vast) majority of archival material will NEVER be digitized. (There's too much, and it's too obscure.)

• On a related note: everything that we find on the internet has been scanned, which means someone else found it first. Literally nothing on the internet, for a historian, is "original." Nothing. Now, you could make the same claim for archives--namely, that what is "saved" in an archive is saved deliberately (and much else is lost), and thus reflects the values of the time/archive. And that is true. But most archives are in practive much 'messier' than that: there is tons (and tons and tons) of stuff that ends up saved (or just surviving), for no real reason. Often, just because it took effort to discard it!! But with digitization, the effort-arrow points the other way: it takes effort to digitize, and this makes "accidental" finds actually impossible. So, in other words: the sources that historians are increasingly rely upon are already reflecting the narrow vision of contemporary (NOT historical) evaluation as to whether it is Important.

I worry about this. Yes, I find my life is much easier with so much more at my fingertips (via digitization) now.

But I also see younger scholars and grad students NOT recognizing how small (and narrow, and pre-digested) this new world is.

I actually got into a wine-soaked (and good-natured) debate with a junior colleague about this a year ago or so... but it left me a bit shocked by how much he did NOT know--and how much of the larger picture he was missing-- because he hadn't spent hardly any time in the archives. And worse: he did not know how much he did not know... and didn't really believe me when I tried to explain what I just wrote here.

For me it's the sheer volume and indexing of records and accounts of mostly mundane material that makes things interesting. Coupled with OCR and improved hand writing recognition millions of documents can now be made "searchable".

An example of this that I recently heard was that there was a project to digitize the entire log history of the US Navy Submarine corps. Every Sub, every log, ever. Now most of that will still obviously be highly classified, but even the unclassified version would be a wonderful trove of searchable material that would have been much more difficult to run through.

Presidential Archives would be similar. While it is fun to spend days looking for an actually holding some amazing documents (Like say briefing papers with Ike's handwritten notes when Sputnik launched) when you research, it would save hours of time if you could simply log in to the right system and search your keyword (like Sputnik) and get a full list of references and documents with the keyword highlighted.

If being a Historian were my full time gig, I would either be looking into picking up a few courses in data science (in particularly text search and analysis) or looking to partner with a data science department to help get through the growing piles of available information.

Digitizing fanzines.

Okay, that doesn't sound exciting, but as far as pulp studies go, fanzines from the '30s, 40s, and 50s are either primary sources or the very earliest ur-secondary sources. It contains letters, ruminations, memoirs, and anecdotes on many pulp writers and stories that have never been republished anywhere, and are rare and expensive on the collector's market. So that's cool.

There is now a OCR tool that can read the squiggly cursive Japanese script (kuzushiji) with up to 85% accuracy with machine learning. A lot of historical Japanese documents (komonjo) are just lying around in used book stores in Tokyo because they are written in a script that's only readable to 0.01% of the Japanese population, waiting for some university researcher to take an interest in them. This tool says it only takes 2 seconds to transcribe a whole page into modern Japanese. If this tool works does what it says then we could be looking at an explosion of newly readable Japanese historical documents for researchers to analyse.

There's some very exciting work being done with AI reading of handwriting which could be very useful for the digitisation of documents. At present it requires a lot of training to be able to read old handwriting, and document transcription has to be done by hand which is an incredibly slow process. If we can digitise collections of documents accurately then the process of studying them and searching through them for interesting information will be made so much easier.

I'm very interested to see how some of the discoveries in the Amazon are going to turn out. Not just because of the incredible human artefacts being turned up, but because of my usual field being environmental this could lead to some really exciting information on how forests regrow, retake former 'civilized' spaces, and just generally how it affects nature.

In some ways its like some of the books where humans just vanish. What happens to cities and civilization? Nature reclaims them sooner or later. This is an area of the world that for a long time we thought had nothing like this, and its turning out that parts of the forest are not quite as old as we thought.

Very exciting to see what develops.

New names and new narratives being found by local and family historians to add to an increasingly larger list of domiciled British soldiers of African ancestry in the First World War.

A big obstacle for any researcher dealing with minorities in Europe (unlike the United States) is that the topic of race is not commonly mentioned on the rosters, draft cards or other military documents that attests to an individual's service. Many, if not all, domiciled Black British soldiers did not have any names that would make them stick out of a crowd when you're going through lists looking for them. You could sometimes be in luck if you manage to find a medical note commenting on the soldier's race, usually in a negative form, but this isn't a frequent occurrence. Many researchers today investigating black British soldiers in the First and Second World War have to base their research on matters like local and family history, contemporary and post-war reports of black British servicemen in newspapers and other popular media as well as the occasional mentions in official government and military documentation. There has been tremendous leaps forward in uncovering new stories in the last 20 years thanks to ordinary people simply sharing their family history or local history socities uncovering forgotten histories of minorities who fought alongside their white neighbours. There are many more stories left to be revealed and together, they can contribute to piercing what I call the ”White Mythic Space” of the First World War.

Even though my main area pertains to the history of international relations and politics in State-based societies, I am also a violinist, and I give lectures of music appreciation and music history at a university, so musicology, specifically historical musicology, is my secondary area of interest.

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Recently, a group of psychologists and neuroscientists published this article describing a very interesting study regarding absolute pitch (AP). Also known as perfect pitch, it is a very rare ability that allows a person to listen to a note, identify and recreate it, without the aid of a reference tone. The study used groups of musicians with AP, musicians without it, and people without specific music training, in order to determine neurological differences between them. Up to date, AP has been associated with different morphological changes in brain structure, but beyond that, the neurological mechanisms behind its existence are speculation. Since the causes are unknown, AP is believed to be linked to genetics, but this idea has been widely debated and doubted for quite some time.

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Their findings conclude that the subjects with AP showed an increased development in the auditory cortex of the brain, specifically in regards with some auditory capabilities which are too scientific to reduce to a short text. The main conclusion is that this particular cortical change must be directly linked to genetic control, providing more evidence and hence opening up the possibility of, one day, actually determining that the development of AP is genetic in nature.

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So why is this interesting for historical musicology? It allows for the further study of the genealogy of those composers and musicians who had and have absolute pitch, opening up a world of possibilities regarding their family history past and present, allowing for the research of their ancestors and descendants, in order for us to perhaps find more AP musicians. This could mean the birth of a revolutionary approach to the historical study of music, permitting us to investigate even further the family history of great composers and musicians with AP, such as Mozart, Beethoven, Camille Saint-Saëns, Lili Boulanger, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma and many others. Truly exciting stuff!

British Museum's translations of the many thousands of tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal that included texts from Sumerian, Akkadian and in cuneiform.

Lots of old shit and old translations there that were looted from Babylon.

GPS imaging

LIDAR, I assume you mean?

This isn't new technology, nor newly begun, but Lyndall Ryan's Massacre Map project is currently researching and mapping Western Australia, having already done the rest of the country to the best it can be. This is a project that is deeply meaningful to Indigenous communities all across the country, and it is also a new approach to massacre, since Ryan has utilised techniques used in situations of genocide abroad. The information she is finding and compiling is extremely useful, as are the visuals of the map itself, and she has already stated that her work on the map has had a profound effect on how she thinks of genocide attitudes in colonial Australia. It has also been useful in spotting trends in massacre.

When I spoke to her a few months back, she talked about how they might add a settlement/frontier overlay to the map, to show how quickly conflict could develop and how important greed was in these massacres.

The recently discovered Mittani palace, especially because they found tablets. A culture with Vedic language and terminology in northern Syria/Anatolia around the same time that the Rig Veda was first being composed in India. There's so much to dissect just with that.

As an amateur equine historian, I'm quite interested in the application of genetics to analyze past horse breeds and skeletons found at various sites worldwide. At present, the steppes of Eurasia is the accepted origin of domestication for horses with a lot of interest falling on sites like Botai in Kazahkstan. What has been most interesting so far is the revelation that the genes of the horses found at Botai have more in common with Przewalski's horse in Mongolia than modern domesticated horses. This suggests that the modern horse must have been domesticated elsewhere.

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I'm very curious where in the world we will find the most similarities in the genome as it could indicate either a) domestication happened independently between cultures or b) domestication was a shared technology that spread from Eurasia elsewhere. Alternatively, the answer could be both. Suffice to say, I'd really like to know where modern horses come from.

I work in public history in Nova Scotia. One of my colleagues is working with Map Annapolis to map the Garrison Graveyard at Fort Anne National Historic Site. This cemetery is the oldest cemetery for an English speaking community in Canada; early cemeteries had many wooden markers which makes it difficult to delineate the cemetery boundaries.

Annapolis Royal is also among the earliest Acadian communities and they have discovered an Acadian cemetery in the area of the English one by using ground penetrating radar.

This same colleague is working with the same people at Fort Edward in Windsor, Nova Scotia. They are using Lidar to reveal undiscovered features of the site. In particular, they believe they have found an Acadian cemetery there that was previously unknown and will be confirming this in the near future. The significance of this is that the site is known to be the location of the Acadian parish church but the original location of the church and lay out of the site is unknown.

This excites me as the technology allows for us to undertake non-invasive exploration of archaeological resources at a cost that is incredibly low.

As someone who studies gay politics in the American South I am very excited about the plethora of sources that are becoming easily available in my area. There is so much information that, just until the past few years, has gone mostly unrecognized, particularly in deep south states such as Alabama where I have done my research. With the founding of groups like the Invisible Histories Project this information is finally being collected on a significant scale so that it can be made easily available to historians. This has the potential to greatly complicate our understanding of gay rights history as much of the scholarship in this area has focused on major cities like New York and San Francisco.

I find the new ‘high resolution’ isotope analysis of incremental Dentine really interesting. From a single tooth you can see how an individuals diet changed throughout their childhood. Until now isotope analysis of diet has largely been through bone collagen which I believe only gives you a rough idea of what they ate in their last decade of life. Now you can actually see specific information in smaller time frames to show seasonal changes in diet, or famine indicates by a sudden change in diet to a fallback food source.

This is of course limited by age as your teeth only develop for so long, but I think there is potential as the technology increases to apply the technique to adults as well. When your tooth is damaged down to the root there you produce a thin layer of new dentine to protect it. In the future it may therefore be possible to apply this to older individuals with extremely carious teeth.

As several people have mentioned in this thread, mass digitization efforts and OCR are helping historians, myself included, bring unexplored portions of the last to life with greater speed, accuracy, and even more verification and validation from primary sources.

Twenty years ago in Texas, you might have had to travel hundreds of miles to track down a microfilm roll of a particular newspaper, as many libraries would never send their newspaper films through ILL. I’ve done that before.

Today, commercial and free databases put newspapers from every region of the state and most counties at your fingertips. While easy access to digitizations of archives of a small handful of major metro dailies is still difficult due to companies like Belo and their strict control of archives like the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald that they shuttered, it is much easier to find things than it was 20 years ago.

Digitizations—ranging from volumes of minutes of the annual conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church to Freedmen’s Bureau Records to legislative journals to journals of Texas constitutional conventions to newspaper digitizations—recently helped me piece together the history of a church founded by freed slaves in 1866 to help secure a historical marker for the church.

Without newspaper digitizations, I never could have backed up the claim Etta Moten Barnett was the first black woman to sing solo at the White House last year to secure a historical marker for her. We certainly had Etta’s word in oral histories and in secondary sources. As far as other primary sources than the oral history to confirm vivid details of the account, the Roosevelt library had nothing, even though she was invited by ER. The White House Historical society had nothing. The mainstream press had nothing. An Associated Negro Press story showed up in women’s pages of a digitized black newspaper confirming it happened and providing Etta’s immediate reaction, not her reaction 40 years later when asked in oral histories.

Newspaper digitizations have helped me prove the specific dates on which news of emancipation reached particular towns in Texas after June 19, 1865.

Newspaper archives have also helped me unearth (and I’m being deliberately vague here because the project is unfinished) the earliest cases of bus desegregation decisions in a particular state more than two decades before Rosa Parks. That then allows research in actual archives or courthouses, and even attempts to locate families, etc.

I can complete projects much quicker than I could 20 years ago. And I don’t have to find researchers in far flung places and hope they don’t miss something or pay an arm and a leg for the same.

So much forgotten history of the 19th and 20th centuries will soon be brought back to light across the nation thanks to these advances.

There's some really fascinating work that I've learned about recently in "space archaeology" (which I personally think is a silly name designed to drum up more buzz). Archaeologists, with I think Sarah Parcak in the lead, are using LIDAR and other satellite tech to identify new sites at an insane rate. You still have to go and do a dig for more pedestrian (as in day-to-day life, rather than how a landmass might have informed where this people gathered) revelations compared to the macroscopic, but it's uncovering entire chunks of archaeological history that no one had identified before. Parcak's book is Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past if you want to read more.

As an aspiring anthropologist, DNA tech is very exciting. We can know so much more about all remains we find (and stuff still hidden away in museums the hasn't been tested yet)

That, paired with a variety of dating tech, really opens up a lot of possibilities

I’m excited about the proliferation of cell phones and the internet. Imagine a scenario 20 years ago, a farmer is plowing his field in rural India and he finds an old pottery shard. It looks interesting, but he and his friends know nothing about pottery, historic or otherwise. He brings it home and places it on a shelf, because it’s a curiosity. It languishes for a year or two until it’s thrown out after a frantic mother-in-law pre-visit cleaning day.

Fast forward to now. The farmer’s son or daughter are in the field, plowing as their forebears did, and they notice a pottery shard in the field. They pick it up, find it interesting, and text the image to their friends. One friend posts it to a forum and an amateur archaeologist sees it... etc. etc.

It’s really the crowd sourcing that’s most exciting to me. People love stories, and at its most simplistic, history is the collection and analysis of stories. With archaeology and history becoming accessible, I’m looking forward to all the amateur historians adding and enriching content.

Forums like this one, that invite amateur historians to join in the fun while also enforcing a modicum of academic rigor, are the future of history.

We're sorry, but we have removed this question for breaking the following rules:

Rule 3: No poll-type questions. Questions should be clear with a specific time and place in mind.

:P

That said, the creation of a historical orthodoxy for events in the recent past. Being the first person to attempt to write a history of the recent past must be quite difficult, especially with the increasing global scale and dramatic increase in available data. There are many events in the past twenty or so years which were puzzling to live through and it will be exciting to be able to finally understand them in their proper context.