As historians start researching the late twentieth century, they are increasingly finding traces of the past created digitally. At the same time, use of computers to digitise analogue material means that many pre-digital sources have been reproduced digitally. As such, future historical research will increasingly include digital forms of evidence and computer-based research tools. This paper explores how such resources might be used within business history, bridging the gap to digital history, and reflecting upon their methodological implications. We present a framework for distinguishing between sources, elaborating their differing digital characteristics and historical authenticity. We then draw on our own use of digital company records and media archives to outline two different ways digital sources can be interrogated by business historians.We argue that digital sources afford unique insights and new opportunities for historical knowledge production, but to access them, business historians will likely adapt aspects of their future practice.
Preservation of emails poses particular challenges to future discovery as alternative historical sources. Emails represent communications between individuals and contain a wealth of information when viewed as an organisation-wide collection. Existing search tools can extract named entities and keyword searches but are less effective when it comes to extracting patterns and contextual information across multiple custodians. To address this, we present EMCODIST, a discovery tool for searching the contextual information across emails using attention-based models of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The EMCODIST aims to steer end-users to personalise their searches towards a concept. In this paper, we explain the definition of the 'context' for emails which is also suitable for object-oriented computational modelling. The tool is evaluated based on the relevancy of the emails extracted.
Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to be meaningfully accessed, the context of email must form part of this access. In exploring this idea, we focus on discovery within large, multi-custodian archives of organisational email, where emails’ network features are particularly apparent. We introduce our prototype search tool, which uses AI-based methods to support user-driven exploration of email. Specifically, we integrate two distinct AI models that generate systematically different types of results, one based upon simple, phrase-matching and the other upon more complex, BERT embeddings. Together, these provide a new pathway to contextual discovery that accounts for the diversity of future archival users, their interests and level of experience.
We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with its own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to observe.
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