Digital Sport History

Abstract

This article traces the history of sport historian’s use of digital technologies for the purposes of scholarly research and production. The article begins by discussing how quantitative and social sport history served as an early form of digital sport history that was enabled by statistical software and the popularization of spreadsheets for researchers’ use. The article then discusses how the proliferation of the internet created the opportunity for new forms of scholarly production while also enabling internet cultures and social media as areas of interest for sport historians. It locates the mass digitization effort of the late 1980s and 1990s as pivotal for sport history as researchers could more easily identify and access digital sport heritage around the world. It then highlights how those digitized objects have served as fodder for digital sport historians to analyze the sporting past. The article closes by looking briefly to the future of digital methods and calls for their embrace in methodology courses, professional associations, and sport history publications.