ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

By creating digital humanities tools for researchers in history of science, the EIDA project

• In Event: DH in the History of Premodern Sciences 2

English Abstract

This paper proposes to examine how, owing to his training in statistics and programming, a French medievalist in the mid-1980s was able to reinterpret an ancient textual artefact in a fundamentally new way. More provocatively, I suggest that this case can be understood as a ‘Gestalt switch’ prompted by a particular form of acculturation to computing. I use it to discuss in which conditions the introduction of digital methods in the historian’s craft should be considered ‘revolutionary’.
Although this case study concerns the historiography of feudalism, it provides an opportunity to articulate a series of questions and methodological options that I believe are relevant for an investigation of the digital turn in the history of science. My central argument is essentially methodological: it is the historian’s gaze at textual artifacts that must be examined with precision, because such “revolutions” occur primarily at very local scales.
Drawing upon the aforementioned case-study, I will first discuss how the transformation of the epistemology of history was, in this context, driven not by a renewed access to historical sources, but rather by a new perception of historical synthesis. I will then turn to the rich exchanges that subsequently took place between the medievalist and the author of one of the monographs, with the aim to raise how data aggregation is related to historical theory. I argue that these two dimensions are crucial for thinking in a unified way about the evolution of the history of science in the digital age.

Author

• Edgar Lejeune