ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Sources to Systems: How Computational Methods Are Reconfiguring Historical Knowledge in the Age of Plural Worlds

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-3

English Abstract

The digital revolution has not only expanded the historian’s methodological toolkit; it has reshaped the very epistemic architecture of historical knowledge. Drawing on long-term projects that integrate early modern sources into large-scale, CIDOC-CRM–based knowledge graphs and on recent work using X-gram models, corpus-level statistical analysis, and unsupervised comparisons of textual traditions, this talk examines how computational methods transform the granularity, structure, and relationality of historical evidence. I discuss the epistemological implications of delegating parts of interpretation to algorithmic systems and outline how such infrastructures create new possibilities, but also new responsibilities, for future historical inquiry. In doing so, I argue that emerging forms of “computational hermeneutics” produce new plural scientific worlds while challenging traditional boundaries of historical authority.

Author

• Matteo Valleriani, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science