This talk will demonstrate how our research practices are shaping our digital ecology in ways that directly affect cultural heritage, the contours of future research, and in fact the very direction of our methodological innovation (a form of path dependency where the decision to research certain digital collections becomes constitutive of the digital future of that subfield). Using the field of Cold War history as a case study, I will argue that on a subject-specific, subfield level we need to be more aware and more self-reflexive about the legacy of our DH projects and digitization-driven research, both when planning a new project and in the aftermath of completing one.
