Abstract
Burton and Appleford discusses the history of digital techniques. Ironically, it is the computer that has entrenched history as a discipline firmly into the humanities and away from the modeling and quantitative techniques generally associated with the social sciences. Today, desktop and laptop computers have opened exciting opportunities for historians to work with texts in new and comprehensive ways, and the history profession clearly sees the humanities as including data and evidence. Perhaps there is a lesson for the generation of emerging digital historians: part of the negative reaction to the quantitative and social science-based "new history" failed revolution was that often this history was presented with arrogance and no tolerance for the traditional history methodology. Now existing digital databases, including the 1940 census, which has been made available in full to researchers in a digital format, as well as fairly easy-to-work-with statistical programs, encourage more historians (and other humanists and social scientists) to use computers to address structural and quantitative questions. We all want to bring history back into a total, or a whole discipline, using all the evidence available to better reconstruct history.