A Digital Humanities Approach to the History of International Ideas: Computer-Assisted Research on 20th-century Cultural Treaties
The study of the history of ideas about international relations and world order, or what the historian David Armitage has called “the intellectual history of the international,” is an exciting field within the historical social sciences. How can the technologies of the digital humanities be brought to bear in this field? Benjamin Martin’s project, based at Uppsala in cooperation with HUMlab, explores several approaches to this problem. It examines the historical emergence of a global concept of culture in the twentieth century through a comparative, multi-method study of the cultural treaties between states, including quantitative analysis of treaty data as well as text analysis of the treaties’ content. The goal is to get the most out of these sources by blending digital methods with more traditional approaches.