In a world of online archives and artificial intelligence, the ability to conduct fieldwork and in-person research has become a privilege. As graduate students, we are instructed to utilize the technology provided to us and to limit expenses in response to rapidly declining funding, especially within the humanities. This can become an easy routine to fall into: sometimes it is simply easier to use online resources to avoid the perceived headaches that accompany research travel. As historians, we are taught to embrace digital history – and while there is certainly space to do so – as an environmental historian, I question: at what cost?
Of course, this is not meant to discredit technology entirely. For historians who do not have the capacity to conduct in-person fieldwork, online archives can be an incredibly useful tool to ensure that the historical discipline is accessible. I have admittedly used them on occasion and do appreciate their value. What I do question, however, are the problems of institutional funding that limit scholarly choice and a lack of support that leaves graduate students, early-career researchers, and lower-income scholars with no choice but to rely on institutional technology to complete necessary components of their work. Additionally, the use of technology is expanding beyond mere digitization of archival materials: we are seeing an increased use of AI – and generative AI in particular – within historical spaces. AI is being used as a research tool and occasionally even as a research partner.
My historical research is not only academic; it is ancestral. As a woman who researches the land of her ancestors (both my dissertation and familial lineage live in Ktaqmkuk / Newfoundland), my essential sources are found in local community archives, in physical, tangible spaces, and rarely in digital spaces. This article serves to open a conversation surrounding the balance of technology and community in environmental history and advocates for a resurgence of place-based learning, oral history, and ancestrally-grounded approaches to conducting historical research. This conversation challenges the increasing separation of research and land within an increasingly digital field.
As a PhD candidate, my research explores the intersection of environment, race, and cultural identity in Newfoundland’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century mining communities. I have just returned from my second research trip to Newfoundland. During my first trip in the fall 2025 semester, I lived in St. John’s for six weeks while I conducted both archival research and fieldwork. Living amongst the community allowed me to understand the history of the place in a way that technology could not: I became familiar with how Indigenous and Livyer (Settler)[1] Newfoundlanders interacted with their island throughout history and into the present. I began to understand more deeply how members of my own family understood culture, community, and tradition and how all of those intrinsically interacted with the physical environment. In a place like Newfoundland, history cannot ever be entirely separated from the land.
In a conversation surrounding Ktaqmkuk in particular, Red River Métis/Michif scholar Max Liboiron writes that “the Land is loud here, and settlers, Indigenous people (local and come-from-away), and others tend to notice their Land relations.”[2] For mining communities, such as Bell Island and Buchans in Newfoundland, the physical environment encompasses the entire history of the town. Put simply, you cannot understand the breadth of the history without physically visiting the location. Local histories such as these become a case of embodied histories, and to cite Joy Parr, “in our times, embodied histories are often repressed or forgotten. The task here is, through the interrogation of several vibrant and vital instances, to reclaim them.”[3] Parr further asserts that in embodied environmental histories, the body (and senses in particular) become “both the archive and the instrument tuned to these encounters.”[4] Taking this another step, I argue that the body also becomes our own research tool: it picks up on encounters and sidenotes that are absent from the technological, institutional, and written narrative. I wonder: if the senses are a research tool, are emotions also within this sphere? Is it possible to view physical material and obtain a better sense of the history from an expression on a subject’s face, or the physical landscape? Online archives provide access to primary source material, but often only located in the physical archive are past researchers’ field notes, photographs, and cassette tapes. By interacting with these physical materials and the memories they hold, we then see beyond the margins of the source material: the humanness of the research process that we then engage with in our own practice.
During my most recent trip, I stumbled across a small local archive in Central Newfoundland. The most valuable experience of my doctoral research thus far was found in an afternoon spent with two local elderly women who worked together to manage a collection of the town’s history, helping me to pull unassuming but essential documents off dusty shelves while passing along anecdotes about the period that I was studying. The documents I was able to view are not available digitally. Even more important, and also not digitized, was the wisdom I received from the women who spent their afternoon with me. Had I not stepped away from the computer and stepped into community, this interaction would have never occurred. In local communities of Ktaqmkuk, local history is not always documented, much less digitized. Instead, it is passed down through stories as oral histories. In these places, the kitchen table is as much of an archive as the institutional library. Métis scholar Cindy Gaudet stresses the importance of oral knowledge transmission in her work on Keeoukaywin, or the Visiting Way Methodology. Gaudet writes that “gender plays an important role in keeoukaywin, given that visiting often occurred inside and around the household—the respected domain of women’s authority… through the practice of visiting, women have a vital role in keeping families and communities together, passing on knowledge, and protecting kin and community relationships.”[5] Important to stress here too is the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge and methodology from large-scale institutional technology initiatives.
Gifted Archival Material from the Grand-Falls Windsor Heritage Centre Archives, located in Central Newfoundland. Photo by the author, 2026. [Image Description: The author’s hand holds two overlapping books. The first is titled Newfoundland: Canada’s Happy Province, and the second is titled Heritage of the Sea…Our Case on Offshore Mineral Rights.]
As an environmental historian, I must also stress the importance of land and nature as a primary source. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to tour the Bell Island mine, one of my dissertation’s case studies. Leading up to my tour, I considered myself well informed on the mine: I had read endless historical primary and secondary material, and I had continuously browsed online pictures and recollections. It was not until I entered the mine myself that I truly felt the history that I’ve studied for the past two years. To breathe in the dirt and mist of a 131-year-old space is an experience that cannot be fully transcribed onto paper, much less uploaded to a technological platform. To listen and learn from the land is a type of lived knowledge that must not be discredited in a modern digital world.
Photograph of the Bell Island No. 2 Mine, taken on the tour provided by the Bell Island Community Museum in Newfoundland, Canada. Photo by the author, 2026. [Image Description: A photograph of the Bell Island mine, taken underground. The photo is dark and misty, showing one of the old mining tunnels.]
The conversation surrounding technological use in the historical field is an ongoing one, especially with the growing concern of defunding in the humanities. In response, I argue that technology is best used as a secondary tool, not as a primary replacement for human-based knowledge. Of course, as previously stated, the ability to categorize technology as a secondary tool has become a privilege in itself. This, and the bigger privilege of knowing my land, is a feat that I wish to see normalized for all. To visit is to give gratitude to your research, to learn from the human and non-human actors of the region. Regarding projects that specifically engage with familial history and community, visiting is an opportunity to reconnect with our roots and ground ourselves in work that honors those who lived before us. As historians, we must consider the loss of essential skills resulting from a reliance on AI and technology. As humans, we must consider the loss of connection. AI is not our ancestor.
[1] “Livyer” is a common Newfoundland term, referring to a permanent settler in Newfoundland and Labrador.
[2] Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), 29.
[3] Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010), 23.
