How to Make it in History. Working Towards a Methodology of Canon Research with Digital Methods

This paper proposes a methodology for studying canonisation of people in history with digital methods. These canons are for the most part culturally determined. For a select group of people, there is no doubt that they merit the necessary attention, but there is a large gray field of ‘second rate’ individuals who had an impact on history of which only a small group is included in more than a footnote. This makes the attention people get from historians rather arbitrary, subjective and unacademic. Digital humanities technologies can help us to work around this arbitrariness and to get insight into the canonisation processes.