Already before the integration of AI into society, digitalisation has changed the field of history in a lasting way: digitised source material makes it easier for researchers to advance their research efficiently; using word processing programmes and OCR, historians can analyse larger source corpora more quickly and perhaps find new, previously invisible, historical aspects that expand the narrative. Big data has definitely arrived in historical studies. But how does born-digital data, i.e. data that never existed in analogue form, influence our view of history? In this lecture, a case study of small digital data will be used to show how a male-dominated master narrative was deconstructed, and the female side made visible, using born-digital data.

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Rachel Huber studied cultural management in Zurich, cultural studies in Lucerne, and global history at the University of Hamburg. She worked as a research assistant and completed her doctorate with a focus on intersectional digital history, (digital) cultures of remembrance, and the history of discrimination in the USA and Switzerland from 2016 to 2021 at the University of Lucerne, where she also worked as a senior assistant and project manager from 2022 to 2023.
She was a member of the editorial board of the open access journal Public History Weekly from 2018 to 2020, and from 2022 to 2023 she led the third-party funded project ‘Auslegeordnung Erinnerungskultur Zürich’ (laying out Zurich's Culture of Remembrance). The research contract was awarded by the Presidential Department of Zurich. Since September 2023, she has been an associate researcher in Digital Humanities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern.