In this paper, we review the premises and practice of the historical method in order to understand how it can be applied to studying information systems (IS) related phenomena. We first examine the philosophical and methodological foundations of the method. For this purpose, we introduce a four-tiered research framework, which consists of (1) the paradigmatic or meta-theoretic assumptions that ...

In an overview of the history of post war British sociological research Mike Savage traces a transition from what he describes as a ‘gentlemanly sociology’ – normative in intention drawing on narrative and secondary sources – to a technical and empirical project employing the new methods of the interview and the survey. The latter, he suggests, abandoned an evolutionary project of relating past...

In this talk, the key components of a multifunctional historical document research system are discussed. An ongoing project which aims at creating a representative corpus of documents that reflect the impact of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the period 1865-1945 forms the case study for the research system. The realisation of the system includes several working fields: the collec...