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Many projects fail, especially IT projects. The only way that companies can get better at performing projects is by learning from projects they have carried out. But traditional practice of holding a lessons-learned session during or following a project may not allow organizations to examine the deep and “messy” reasons why projects fail, particularly with complex projects. Complex projects can best be understood by using modeling, such as cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping aids identification of causal chains and where these close in on themselves to form positive feedback loops, which helps to understand not only what went wrong, but also the reasons. Cognitive mapping is used to understand the impacts of management decisions on a project, both intended and unintentional. This approach is used here to examine a large software development project carried out by an insurance company which overran its original plan by several years. Some suggestions are made both for using such methods and lessons to be learned for future projects.

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Digital history has only rarely created interpretative or argumentative scholarship that contributes back to disciplinary understandings of the past. The reasons for this are varied: digital historians have often preferred to create scholarship for public audiences, or they have pursued forms of scholarship which do not lend themselves to explicit interpretation. But we contend that digital historians have not had sufficient models of patterns of historical argumentation compatible with digital historical research. In this introduction, we read the articles by Rachel Midura and Leonardo Barleta that appear in this special section, and a series of other articles, in order to show the patterns of historical argumentation that digital historians can pursue. A companion website features versions of the articles by Midura and Barleta, as well as eight additional previously published articles, annotated by their authors to highlight how they developed their historical arguments so they can serve as models for argumentative digital history.

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As the fields of digital humanities and digital history have grown in scale and visibility since the 1990s, legal history has largely remained on the margins of those fields. The move to make material available online in the first decade of the web featured only a small number of legal history projects: Famous Trials; Anglo-American Legal Tradition; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Early efforts to construct hypertext narratives and scholarship also included some works of legal history: “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Courts,” in Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies; Who Killed William Robinson? and Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska. In the second decade of the web, the focus shifted from distributing material to exploring it using digital tools. The presence of digital history grew at the meetings of organizations of historians ranging from the American Historical Association to the Urban History Association, but not at the American Society for Legal History conferences, the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, or the British Legal History Conference. Only a few Anglo-American legal historians took up computational tools for sorting and visualizing sources such as data mining, text mining, and topic modeling; network analysis; and mapping. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay's Master and Servant project text mined a comprehensive database of 2,000 statutes and 1,200,000 words to explore similarities and influence among statutes. Data Mining with Criminal Intent mined and visualized the words in trial records using structured data from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Locating London's Past, a project that mapped resources relating to the early modern and eighteenth century city, and also made use of the Old Bailey records. Digital Harlem mapped crime in the context of everyday life in the 1920s. Only in the past few years has more digital legal history using computational tools begun to appear, and like many of the projects discussed in this special issue, most remain at a preliminary stage. This article seeks to bring into focus the constraints, possibilities, and choices that shape digital legal history, in order to create a context for the work in this special issue, and to promote discussion of what it means to do legal history in the digital age.

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