In his recently published book Trading Zones of Digital History, dr. Max Kemman examines digital history collaborations and reflects on the positioning of digital history between the digital and the historical. Kemman has a background in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science and History. In this lecture he will elaborate on the book and his approach to this subject.

Digital History has been characterised as a meeting between historians and computational experts to pursue digital approaches to historical research questions. While these two communities do not coordinate practices on a global scale (pursuing different research objectives and publishing in different formats in different venues), on a local scale negotiation is feasible to pursue a joint research problem. To study these local cross-disciplinary negotiations, Kemman employs the concept of trading zones by the historian of science Peter Galison and develops this into a framework based on three dimensions: engagement (how they meet), power relations (who is in control) and changing practices (specifically how historians change in research practices). In this talk Kemman will elaborate on this framework of trading zones and how Digital History collaborations continuously negotiate these dimensions and construct different trading zones through cross-disciplinary engagement, negotiation of research goals and individual interests.

Read the full abstract of this lecture here.

About Max Kemman

Max Kemman (1987) has a background in Artificial Intelligence (Utrecht University BSc, 2009) and Information Science (Utrecht University MSc, 2011). He has investigated the design of digital tools for historical research at Erasmus University Rotterdam. At the University of Luxembourg he conducted PhD research on the cross-disciplinary collaboration between historians and computational experts, leading to a PhD in history (2019). Currently, Kemman works at Dialogic as a researcher/consultant. He is specifically interested in how science, scholarship and higher education operate and have an impact on society. Visit his website.