How did early modern people imagine the future—and who shaped it? Analyzing 4,900 English letters (1410–1695), Sara Budts shows how phrases like “God willing” slowly faded, revealing a shift from Providence toward human agency and a more uncertain, self-shaped future.

What can 7,500 divine references in early modern letters tell us about how people imagined the future? Using the CEEC, Sara Budts maps when and how writers invoked God, revealing a patchy decline: routine phrases faded, but appeals persisted in illness, crisis, and war.

From “God willing” to “I trust in God,” early modern letters show how people used divine appeals to navigate uncertainty. Through corpus analysis, Sara Budts traces England’s uneven secularisation: routine invocations faded, but personal faith deepened, especially in times of crisis.

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised. As recent studies have emphasised the gradual nature of this shift, this paper zooms in on the pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in a large body of English letters written between 1450 and 1700. Did fifteenth century people appeal to God more often than seventeenth century people did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularisation of time proceed at the same pace across all communities, despite their differences in religious practice? We address these questions by querying nearly 5000 early modern letters for divine appeals and systematically annotating them for variables like human and divine agency, temporal orientation and domain of life. Our results indicate that while the more formulaic divine appeals found in the opening and closing sections of letters were growing less popular over time, the ones in the letter bodies fluctuated in particular with the religious denominations of the letter writers. The observed rise in mentions of divine entities in the first half of the seventeenth century is mainly caused by a small group of puritan letter writers whose involvement in the civil wars throughout the 1640 made their lives particularly perilous. The other letter writers in the corpus, by contrast, displayed progressively lower rates of divine appeals as time went by, a finding that is in line with previous research that saw the early modern period as one characterised by the increasing secularisation of future thought as well as a shift from religious practice to religious faith.

Early modern letters are full of phrases like “God willing” or “By God’s grace.” Sara Budts’ analysis of 5,000 letters shows these weren’t clichés but ways to navigate faith, agency, and uncertainty. From 1450–1700, people balanced divine will with human action in shifting ways.

Net.Create’s Design‑Based History Research foundation lets @jdanish @kalanicraig show how tool design aligned with historical argumentation can guide future digital‑history tools and support robust, debate‑ready scholarship.

Design‑Based History Research (DBHR) is an iterative method from @jdanish @kalanicraig that turns theoretical insights into practical digital‑history tool‑design interventions, clarifying the researcher’s role in digital‑history workflows and informing future tool development.

DBHR in Net.Create advances digital‑history methods by integrating theory and practice. By centering evidence interpretation, citation preservation, and debate, it uses rigorous historical inquiry and structured data analysis to guide digital‑history tool design.

Designing Our Digital Past: Anchoring Digital-History Tool Development in the Historical Method Through Design-Based History Research Many of the tools digital humanists use have come from a variety of disciplines outside of history. As a consequence, many digital-history methods sections focus on how a tool developed by non-historians might support, or need to be adapted for, particular historical questions. Few digital tools have been developed by and for historians with a specific eye to the methodological and theoretical explorations of design principles that are necessary to anchor digital-history-specific tool development in historiographic practices. This article introduces Design-Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design-Based Research (DBR) is an educational-research approach to studying learning theory that supports theory building by integrating theory into the design of new tools and environments, in a manner that allows the designers to rigorously study the theory, and the relationship between the theory and the tools that embody it (Puntambekar, 2018; Sandoval, 2013). In practice, this means that DBR focused on software design incorporates theoretically motivated decisions about user interface features, user activities, and data-structure choices into an initial tool/software-package design and then studies the design package in use as a way of iteratively refining the theoretical principles in each of the tool's design phases. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach, with a theoretical approach grounded in the unique needs of historians and historiographic practices. We aim to illustrate DBHR by describing the design and use of Net.Create, a user-focused network-analysis tool that prioritizes historiographic practices (evidence interpretation, citation preservation, and historiographic debate) in its feature development and user-interface choices (Craig & Danish, 2018). We document how the needs of digital historians shaped the current design of Net.Create, explore the connections between specific tool features and their operation, and delineate how those tool features support the digital-history needs we identified. As part of this iterative-design process, we will also address some of the human-computer-interaction observations, user-entered network data, and qualitative-network-analysis approaches that shaped each stage of our feature development around digital history practices. Our DBHR process ultimately led us to prioritize the development of three features that support and encourage sustained historiographic debate at each phase of a network-analysis digital-history project: simultaneous entry and visualization of capta, data that is gathered and contested rather than downloaded or received, in order to support and encourage historiographic debate during the data-gathering phase and prior to a formal analysis phase easy-to-use revision of network taxonomy and network data, to support interpretation, reinterpretation and re-input of evidence and data by many collaborators simultaneously, synchronously or asynchronously, during the initial analysis phase data provenance features that expose the researchers' positionality and preserve the original citations for each network datapoint, to support the integration of close-reading analytical practices both by the research team and by other historians after the communication of results to a public audience By documenting the historiographic roots of each of these features, we hope to offer a systematic articulation of digital history tool design not simply as software development but as a pathway to the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods.

So excited that eight years of research are now public in the Journal of Digital History: @jdanish and @kalanicraig present a Design‑Based History Research framework and Net.Create, a network analysis tool for digital history.

The paper illustrates how the combination of frequency analysis and diachronic word embeddings can help to explore and understand the development of long-running discourses in large sets of historical data.

The paper shows how combining frequency measures with diachronic word embeddings helps trace long-running political discourses in large historical corpora, revealing how meanings and associations shift over decades.

To assess the semantic changes in how German politicians spoke about the Wehrmacht, we use overlapping diachronic word embeddings. An additional analysis of term frequency measures the level of interest in the Wehrmacht over time.

The Bundestag - (West) Germany’s federal legislature - has published its proceedings since 1949. Digitized editions of these proceedings contain over 900,000 speeches, questions, and interjections, forming a valuable but underutilized corpus of sources on post-war German politics.

Debates on a Burden: Exploring the Connotations of the Wehrmacht in Post-War German Politics This paper investigates the evolving connotations of the Wehrmacht in post-war German parliamentary politics. By analysing term frequencies and comparing diachronic word embeddings on a corpus of German parliamentary debates, we measure prevalence and context of references to the Wehrmacht over time. The results show that the Wehrmacht went from being a prominent issue of defence and welfare policies to near irrelevance by the 1960s. They also indicate that the resurgent post-reunification controversies on the Wehrmacht’s war crimes did not mark a radical shift in political culture, but followed a decades-long trend of increasingly strong associations between the Wehrmacht, war crimes, and Nazism in political speech, that developed alongside an emerging culture of remembrance.

How have German politicians dealt with the burdensome legacy of militarism after the Second World War? This paper explores the connotations of the Wehrmacht in political speech through word embeddings trained on parliamentary proceedings.

Many thanks for the team at @jdighist.bsky.social for everything to bring this article to fruition! Check it out to learn more the utility and limits of LLMs as digital tools for historical research - like using LLMs for OCR, which is a hot topic of late.

How did early modern people imagine the future—and who shaped it? Analyzing 4,900 English letters (1410–1695), Sara Budts shows how phrases like “God willing” slowly faded, revealing a shift from Providence toward human agency and a more uncertain, self-shaped future.

What can 7,500 divine references in early modern letters tell us about how people imagined the future? Using the CEEC, Sara Budts maps when and how writers invoked God, revealing a patchy decline: routine phrases faded, but appeals persisted in illness, crisis, and war.

From “God willing” to “I trust in God,” early modern letters show how people used divine appeals to navigate uncertainty. Through corpus analysis, Sara Budts traces England’s uneven secularisation: routine invocations faded, but personal faith deepened, especially in times of crisis.

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised. As recent studies have emphasised the gradual nature of this shift, this paper zooms in on the pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in a large body of English letters written between 1450 and 1700. Did fifteenth century people appeal to God more often than seventeenth century people did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularisation of time proceed at the same pace across all communities, despite their differences in religious practice? We address these questions by querying nearly 5000 early modern letters for divine appeals and systematically annotating them for variables like human and divine agency, temporal orientation and domain of life. Our results indicate that while the more formulaic divine appeals found in the opening and closing sections of letters were growing less popular over time, the ones in the letter bodies fluctuated in particular with the religious denominations of the letter writers. The observed rise in mentions of divine entities in the first half of the seventeenth century is mainly caused by a small group of puritan letter writers whose involvement in the civil wars throughout the 1640 made their lives particularly perilous. The other letter writers in the corpus, by contrast, displayed progressively lower rates of divine appeals as time went by, a finding that is in line with previous research that saw the early modern period as one characterised by the increasing secularisation of future thought as well as a shift from religious practice to religious faith.

Early modern letters are full of phrases like “God willing” or “By God’s grace.” Sara Budts’ analysis of 5,000 letters shows these weren’t clichés but ways to navigate faith, agency, and uncertainty. From 1450–1700, people balanced divine will with human action in shifting ways.

From tools to sources: By examining LLMs through source criticism, historians can evaluate generative AI's uneven potential while contributing to broader debates about these technologies' societal impact.

Mapping AI's historical knowledge: Benchmarking LLM performance on historical facts, oral history transcription accuracy, and OCR correction tasks reveals uneven capabilities. Results show whose history has been digitized and made computationally legible. #oralhistory #OCR #benchmarks

Mapping the Latent Past: Assessing Large Language Models as Digital Tools through Source Criticism This article examines how digital historians can use large language models (LLMs) as research tools while critically assessing their limitations through source criticism of their underlying training data. Case studies of LLM performance on historical knowledge benchmarks, oral history transcriptions, and OCR corrections reveal how these technologies encode patterns of whose history has been digitised and made computationally legible. These variations in performance across linguistic and temporal domains reveal the uneven terrain of knowledge encoded within generative AI systems. By mapping this "jagged frontier" of AI capabilities, historians can evaluate LLMs not just as tools but as historical sources shaped by the scale and diversity of their training. The article concludes by examining how historians can develop new forms of source criticism to navigate generative AI's uneven potential while contributing to broader debates about these technologies' societal impact.

Examining LLMs as historical sources: This study applies source criticism to AI training data, revealing how patterns of digitization shape what these tools encode. Case studies map this 'jagged frontier' of capabilities across historical tasks, languages & time periods. #DigitalHistory #LLMs

History-focused: What happened to Swedish public service radio when commercial broadcasting arrived? Analyzing 1,600 hours of P1 & P3, this article uncovers shifts in sonic patterns & content variation, offering new insights into the sound history of broadcasting

Navigating the Radio Archive: Segmentation and analysis of Swedish broadcasting data This work aims to explore the relationship between sound archives and historiography, focusing on the Swedish case of mass media archiving from the 1980s. The study investigates the sonic content of public service radio changes during the introduction of commercial broadcasting, using computational methods. In the analysis, two of the most popular public service broadcasting channels, P1 and P3 are compared. By analysing 1,600 hours of radio data, the paper reveals a shift in the number of detected occurrences, with varying sonic sequences that reflect the overall structure of the broadcast. Although the sample sizes are small, the findings show a correlation between object detection and dimension reduction, suggesting and increasing attention to content variation. The paper contributes to the understanding of historical radio data, offering pre-processing and segmentation methods for working with cultural audio data. It also emphasizes the methodological implications of combining dimensionality reduction and object classification approaches, demonstrating the value of using pretrained and untrained algorithms together for a comprehensive understanding of the local and fine-grained aspects of audio data. The necessity of such an approach springs from the oceanic extent of content in the radio archive. Thus, the article suggests new ways to navigate the radio archive

Methodology-focused: How can historians work with thousands of hours of sound? This article introduces segmentation & dimensionality reduction methods for large-scale radio archives, showing how computational analysis reveals hidden structures in public service broadcasting

Journal of Digital History The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

The research shows how digital tools like Aventura.js can mediate archival inquiry. Through an interactive atlas and the Carguero case study, it offers a new approach to reading visual history. journalofdigitalhist...

Inspired by Warburg’s principles, the article transforms static images into interlinked, interactive panels. Its case study of the 19th‐century Carguero deepens our understanding of visual symbolism.

By merging digital techniques with human interpretation, the article demonstrates how interactive panels and data visualizations offer fresh insights into visual archives via the Carguero case.

The study repurposes Aventura.js—a bilingual, open‐source tool—to build digital atlases that trace symbolic connections in historical images, exemplified by Colombia’s Carguero.

Journal of Digital History The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.

A forthcoming article by Rodríguez Gómez and Urueña presents a method for exploring visual collections using interactive panels, inspired by Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, to analyze the 19th‐century Carguero case. journalofdigitalhist...

But these sources raise questions. Can we ethically use archived posts from forums & blogs without consent? How do we avoid overinterpreting what's preserved—and what's lost? The paper ends with a call for cautious, critical digital history.

From lean employment pressures to restrictive benefits, the 2000s marked a turning point. Web archives reveal raw, everyday reflections—from sick workers to HR managers—offering insight into how people understood these changes, not just endured them.