Collaboration isn’t new for historians. A piece of historical scholarship has always involved a range of people. The prologue of most traditional monographs includes a list of those who helped make the book possible. From the support and assistance of archivists and librarians, to review and support by fellow scholars and students, and often financial support from institutions and publishers publishing a work of traditional scholarship is by no means an individual endeavor.
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I TA’d for the first time last spring, my last semester in my masters program. It was the first time I had ever taught and I quickly learned that leading a discussion section and getting freshman interested in World History was challenging. I came away from the semester realizing, what may be obvious to those more experienced teachers, that teaching history to undergrads from a variety of majors is more difficult that it appears.
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Franco Moretti’s article “Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History,” shows how most histories of the book have focused on a few particular books rather than the novel as a genre. This has probably had to do with scale. It would be an overwhelming and almost impossible task to read every single novel in order to write a comprehensive and all-encompassing history of the novel. However, this is where Big Data allows historians to look at large trends in ways that are impractical without computers.
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