Historians have not been immune from the incursion of computing into their lives and work, increasingly influencing questions that they ask of historical evidence, which itself is either electronic or subject to reformulations, thanks to software. These effects were barely a whisper in the 1960s, but they became obvious with the arrival of personal computers, word-processing software, and database-management tools by the 1980s. Barely had historians begun to engage with these developments when the internet became a profoundly important new development. The profession, whether digitally “native” students or senior scholars, has to deal responsibly with all of it. Crymble’s history of how these issues evolved affords historians the opportunity to understand what is still an evolving transformation in how they work and think about their discipline.
Briefly stated, Crymble describes the impact of computers on the historian’s craft through an investigation of the subject from the 1960s to the present...