Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)

Behind the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a deep substrate that includes a vast data management system, highly detailed SGML markup conventions, extensive international labor, and the enormous cultural weight of the Victorian-era DNB. In this article, I argue that it is only by investigating components of our historiographical infrastructure like the ODNB (1.) in their entirety and (2.) as historically contingent digital artifacts that we can fully access their double voice, and it is only then that we can understand the knowledge they make available and the knowledge-making they constrain