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).
„Edgar Lejeune: Is Cumulativity of Knowledge just an Epistemological Chimera? Perspectives from the History of Digital Medieval History (1960-2020)“ weiterlesen