2024 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History

We are delighted to announce that the 2024 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History is awarded to Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian Ahnert for their book Tudor Networks of Power (2023).

In at special lunchtime seminar in May next year, Ruth and Sebastian will join the IHR Digital History Seminar to discuss their prize winning entry. Details of how to join the seminar are available on the seminar page.

The judging panel recognised the book’s clear contributions to historical knowledge, as well as the author’s reflexive approach to methodological innovation. Peter Webster, chair of the panel, said:

In the third year of the Deswarte Prize, the shortlisted entries did not disappoint and again prompted lively discussion among the panel. The winning entry – the first monograph to win the prize – particular impressed the judges with its deft interweaving of historical argument and methodological description. It balanced a weighty contribution to the literature on Tudor government with a generous invitation to further scholarship by others in a multitude of areas. As in previous years, the entries demonstrate the breadth, depth and vitality of digital history today. Richard would, I’m sure, have once again been delighted to see it.

And among those entries that were shortlisted, the judges wish to commend Ordinary Lives: Recovering Deaf Social History through the American Census (2024) by R.A.R. Edwards and Eric C. Nystrom as a striking example of historical research that uses computational methods and the careful assembly of archival material to tell stories of people at the margins, and ‘The Living Machine: A Computational Approach to the Nineteenth-Century Language of Technology’ (2023) by Daniel C.S. Wilson, Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Kaspar Beelen, Barbara McGillivray, and Ruth Ahnert for their innovative methodological contributions and exemplarly approach to authorship attribution.

We thank all that nominated entries for the prize, and our international panel of expert judges. The 2025 edition of the prize will be launched early in the new year.

Richard Deswarte (1965-2021) was one of the founding convenors of the Digital History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London, an advocate for the value and importance of digital history, and an irreplaceable member of the community of digital historians in the UK and beyond.

This annual prize, established in his memory, celebrates the best of digital history internationally. It offers an award of £1,000 for the best output in digital history published in the 17 months prior to the submission deadline. More information on the prize is available here.