Digital worlds are producing ever-increasing amounts of information across databases and such born-digital resources as blogs, websites, social media and digitised physical materials. Such ‘big data’ joins a longstanding world that is deeply rich with a variety of persistent material objects that contain records of the human condition and the human past. As these analogue and virtual worlds collide and co-exist, opportunities abound for scholars to advance interdisciplinary collaborations and expand co-operation throughout institutions and organisations that preserve history and support historical research.
On 1 May 2015, in a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as leaders of the Wellcome Trust and the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division, addressed key philosophical and practical issues impacting the application of digital humanities techniques to the history of medicine. Offering perspectives practised by institutions that are producing digitised and born-digital resources, and from individuals who are using them, this panel engaged audiences associated with both enterprises and challenged them with a wide and sustained reflection on the processes of digitisation and the meaning of ‘big data’ for the future of the medical humanities.
