The idea that computers would help historians to produce cumulative knowledge is omnipresent in the early history of digital history. In the 1960s and 1970s, famous medievalists such as Léopold Génicot, Jean Glénisson or David Herlihy believed that these new technological devices would help in producing new type of source editions, adapted to the historiographical agenda of quantitative history and the history of mentalities. These digital research instruments would then be easily re-used by specialists across the world, and the discipline of medieval history could then make significant progress (Lejeune, 2021; Lejeune, 2024). Fifty years later, the hopes of these early adopters are far from being fulfilled, and the idea that medievalists have missed the digital turn is a commonplace in the discipline. For example, Nicolas Perreaux asserts that there is “a significant gap between the creation of databases – an activity in which medievalists excel […] – and their exploitation” (Perreaux, 2014, 190-191). In a recent interview, Alain Guerreau deplores the fact that so little use is made of statistics in the discipline (Guerreaux and Perreaux, 2021). At a discipline-wide scale, Manfred Thaller argues that the history of digital history is just repeating itself, because of the lack of knowledge about what previous generations have achieved (Thaller, 2017).
This tension raises a fearsome question for Digital History: to what extent has the use of computer been an agent of the cumulativity of the historical knowledge since the early 1960s? And is cumulatively of knowledge an epistemological chimera? The present talk proposes to approach this issue from another perspective than the one of the transmission of quantitative and computationnal methods from generation to generation. I argue that, if one wants to understand the ways in which the development of the historical could be consider cumulative in the digital age, he should focus on how historians have produced digital corpuses, and how they have transformed the corpus practices that historians implement in their resarch. In this context, the expression corpus practices refers to the ways in which historians assemble documents with the aim to address specific issues, in given historiographical and material contexts.
I propose to consider two dimensions to understand to what extent the issue of cumulativy is not as deceptive as Perreaux, Guerreau and Thaller claimed. First, what were the practices of corpuses developped by pionneering digital medievalists in the 1960s and 1970s ? Secondly, how did they implement these practices in the research instruments they produced (database, digital edition of sources) ? And how these practices were transmitted from one instrument to another, shaping the ways in which medievalists might consider corpuses of historical documents?
Based on three case-studies, I will present three approches to historical corpuses that were invented in the 1960s and 1970s in the making of three research instruments: 1) the ARTEM database of orignal charters (ARTEM, Nancy); 2) a corpus of political texts called MEDITEXT (ERA 713, Paris); and 3) the 1427 catasto database (CRH, Paris). I will show that these medievalists develop specific practices of corpuses and implemented them in the research instruments they produced. As we will see, they originated from various historiographical agendas (history of the mentalities, social history, economic history), computational methods (automatic indexing, textometry, data analysis, multivariate statistics) and extra-disciplinary influences (demography, linguistics, sociology). Focusing on the case of the ARTEM, I will then show how these standards circulated from one project to another. The ARTEM database, for example, implemented software and principes borrowed from the CETEDOC in Louvain-la-Neuve, and transmitted its codebook to the CMBA, which is now one of the most important corpus of digitized medieval charters in France. To conclude this talk, I propose to open the discussion on the effect of these new massive corpuses on the historiography, by considering how they are related to a genealogy of practices of corpuses.
Vortrag im Rahmen des „Digital History“-Forschungskolloquiums
Zeit: Mittwoch, 14. May 2025, 16-18 Uhr
Ort: Zoom-Konferenz (Zugang auf Anfrage oder via Mailingliste)
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Digital History Berlin (Redaktion) (7. Mai 2025). Edgar Lejeune: Is Cumulativity of Knowledge just an Epistemological Chimera? Perspectives from the History of Digital Medieval History (1960-2020). Digital History Berlin. Abgerufen am 13. Mai 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13w3y