Extensions

What is clear is that some older collections benefit from newer technologies in today's research, allowing them to be viewed from newer perspectives and 'interacted with' in a more intuitive and intimate way. In the case of kirkgate, the main "new stuffs" the team used were new media.

Let's start with McLuhan's famous theory: "The medium is an extension of the human being". As we've seen in books and documentaries, the study of history in earlier times was a complex and ambitious endeavour that took an inordinately long time to clarify. The medium of the time, some ancient written down, left behind pictures, used objects, etc., allowed the human senses to briefly link to the past. Contemporary eyes see the objects of the past, but the effort involved in "being able to see" is immense, with bundles of letters, boxes of field notes, vast collections of accounts, albums and artefacts. The cost is such that historical research on a particular subject can take several generations to complete.

And when it comes to the new media stage, how can the medium extend the human senses? Is it the ability to zoom in on the details of an Egyptian statue through a computer screen as if it were right in front of one's eyes, or the ability to sit in one's home in Shanghai and simultaneously view British and French documentation on the same period of history? Even better, while all these scenarios are being realised, digitised history is suddenly transformed from a heavy and distant artefact into data, all kinds of data, in a computer, and this means more than just the basic benefit of "convenience" for the researcher.

So what is DATA? In a computer sense, data is information transformed into binary (Jake Vaughan, July 2019). In the context of our practice in kirkgate research, data is something that is presented on the web in the form of text, images, audio, video, etc., and carries a lot of information. In our research, finding and processing data has become a part of the process almost throughout. It is here that perhaps the most crucial role of new media in historical research has begun to emerge: providing data. More specifically, to provide data in a state of high efficiency, high precision, and high volume. This data includes digitised historical artefacts, accounts of the kirkgate in various time periods, fields, and classes, as well as present-day human facts related to the kirkgate. New media provides a wealth of relevant and helpful information for research. This offers the possibility to appreciate the complexity of history and conduct research from multiple perspectives. It is important to maintain objectivity and avoid biased language. Due to this, certain disciplinary barriers have been partially dissolved, allowing non-specialists like us to gain insight into the rules of historical research through the analysis of large amounts of data.

During the data acquisition process, we have noticed a shift in perception. While some view data as a tool to aid in the understanding of history, and historical artefacts as history itself; others see data and digitised collections, as history itself. The paradoxical point reflected in this variation is that the cost of direct access to the artefacts required may become more expensive as the history of a particular period becomes more distant from us. The question arises whether data will actually be recognised as the subject of historical research at this point. In other words, can new media gradually replace traditional research methods in historical research and gain more prominence?

Well, perhaps it is better to start with our own research. What have we done with new media?

From the beginning of the research, internet searches were used to gather basic information about Kirkgate from reliable sources such as the xx and xx websites. This in turn was followed by browsing through the collections website of the University of leeds for information on all the relevant collections, identifying what might be relevant. Then it was time to start the research process: which involved searching relevant literature using various websites, watching pertinent YouTube videos, crawling data with Python, and visualising data with Tableau. Additionally, Adobe products (AE/PR) were used for video production. During this process, my vision, which was originally limited to "documentary research" itself, gradually opened up, and I realised that historical research can be realised in so many forms through new media. Some of the history that we had never known before was clearly presented in front of us in the form of data, and there were times when I really felt that the capacity and availability of the data obtained from the Internet far exceeded that obtained from reading the literature in libraries. And this entire research process took us less than a month and cost us: zero pounds.

In this way, digital historical research seems to have an overwhelming advantage when the time and financial costs are far greater than traditional research methods.It is also true that the subject boundary between artefacts and data has been blurred (Witcomb, 2007). But while new media has very many advantages and offers obvious help in our practice, it also still has some flaws in that cannot be ignored. For example, by searching on one's own, it is a process of obtaining content through subjective initiative, which is usually limited by the knowledge and cognitive level of the searcher, and thus will result in some relatively limited content. In the stage-by-stage presentation of the video study, we found that the focus of the students who also studied kirkgate was different from ours. This highlights the inevitable difference in results when working directly with a large number of artefacts and discovering the problem in the artefacts, as opposed to researching the artefacts independently (which involves going through a screening process first). However, for non-specialists researching a specific topic, the benefits of new media outweigh its limitations. At the same time, however, the authenticity and fairness of the online data may be questioned by many, and in this respect, efforts to improve discernment and a combination of materials to analyse may be able to avoid this problem to some extent.

Taken together, it may be more accurate to consider new media, or digitised artefacts, as an extension or supplement to their physical counterparts. Both old and new media, as well as old artefacts and new technologies, were initially designed to complement each other in an iterative process of updating to gain a better understanding of a particular history.