Digital revolutions: The limits and affordances of online collections

Preprint version

Published in: Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton (eds), The Australian History Industry, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022. https://scholarly.info/book/the-australian-history-industry/

As the COVID lockdowns in 2020 emphasised, the online availability of primary source materials makes historical research possible even when access to the originals is limited. But the undoubted convenience of being able to browse 200 years worth of newspapers at home masks other issues that historians have been slow to acknowledge and address. How do we discover relevant resources? What gets digitised and why? How can researchers use these collections to ask new types of questions?  After more than 25 years, the web has its own history. What problems and possibilities has it brought to the way we understand the past?