Book Review: Burris on Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History

David J. Staley. Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past. Second Edition. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2013. 174 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7656-3386-6; $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7656-3387-3.

Reviewed by Greg Burris (Florida State University)
Published on H-War (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

We can put away the pitchforks and torches; David J. Staley is not a history heretic trying to convert us to cliometricians. This book, an address to his fellow historians, proposes a reexamination of visual methodologies. As Staley notes on several occasions, he sees the computer more like the telescope than the printing press, an instrument of visual inquiry more than a word processor. Staley is careful to be clear that he is not saying that visual history is better. It is simply another tool that historians can put into their repertoire. He calls on historians not to let past mistakes of particular historians prejudice us against useful visual and quantitative methods. However, he also gently tells digital historians not to fall into the same hubris as the cliometricians. Prose has been the medium of historians for 2,400 years, and history begins with the invention of the written word. Computers may add dynamite to our tools next to our mining picks, but that does not mean blowing things up is always appropriate, or that we should start throwing the dynamite at each other ... again.
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