COMPUTERS IN SUPPORT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH.

COMPUTERS IN SUPPORT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH.

1.History informatics describes an emerging subdiscipline of informatics and history, following business informatics in the 1980s and biomedical informatics in the 1990s.

 2.In analogy to those subdisciplines of informatics, the term “History informatics” was recently coined, derived  from the German term “Historische Fachinformatik”.

3.Medieval history was the first branch of the classical humanities (not taking into account modern linguistics) where computer-based quantitative and statistical research was introduced.

4.The centre of activities in this new field is arguably Western Europe, with its rich written sources of medieval history. However, related work has recently also been found in the oriental cultures.

5.The difficult relationship between text (syntax) and information (semantics), as well as the fact that the most interesting information (pragmatics) is “buried under” huge amounts of unprocessed text, still poses a major obstacle to progress in historical document engineering respectively History informatics.

6.Although photographic facsimiles are usually available for the most important bodies of those ancient original document collections, these facsimiles are of little use to a historian wanting to full-text-browse a large archive of medieval documents. this is especially tricky when searching for a particular phrase or text or a particular piece of information hidden in a document in the entire archive.

7.History informatics therefore has two main aims: the provision of methods, techniques and software tools that support the translation of original ancient documents into machine-accessible textual representations (syntax); and the provision of specialised (topic-specific) information  retrieval methods (e.g. indexing, similarity clustering, data mining and data visualisation) to make large amounts of newly generated data automatically accessible for human perception and  understanding.

9.With digital libraries and semantic retrieval methods becoming more available and applicable, one can reasonably expect considerable acceleration in the progress of medieval history research within the next 15 to 20 years..

10.Infinite possibilities of IT had been helping historical research in india,especially in the field of epigraphy.Concordance,a computer programme,supports the humanities in many ways as an important research tool to analyse the text available in digital form,very much useful for the epographical research.

11.In india,information technology has been using to decipher the indus script and also in the statistical analysis of the chola and vijayanagara inscriptions. Decipherment of indus script is an international mission.Computer applications are using to read the indus script.Solike computer aided statistical analysis of south indian inscription (chola and vijayanagara) also brought a new enerjy in this field.Thus ,IT is profitably harnessed to resolve many related issues like copying,storing,retrieving,decipherment,concordance and analysis of this unbound database.

12.There are many digital platforms for the development of history in the form websites.These sites provides materials related with the various historical events,conducts discussions on various issues,posts pictures and videos of historical monuments and sites,shows documentaries of historical importants,paovide access to historical libraries etc.