To Örebro University

Recent developments in digitizing of historical data and advances in software tools for structured analysis of digitized historical data, are creating opportunities to unleash previously untapped ways to use historical data. We build on recent suggestions for methodological integration, for outlining an integrative digital history approach, with the methodological rigor to unleash creative synthesis of business history and organization studies. Methodological integration constitutes an inter-meshing of methods that takes place already from the outset of the research process and remains so throughout the collection of sources, interpretation, and analysis.  This places at the center a careful research design with a relational database for the collection and digitizing of data, structuring and coding of historical sources, historical interpretation, and analytics to be used. We outline key design issues, steps and processes for an integrative digital history approach.  Following, we present the strengths of this approach in comparison to existing ‘analog’ business history and organizational studies methods. We end the paper by discussing future avenues and opportunities for digital history.