Caroline Muller and Frédéric Clavert engage in reflection on what the use of digital technology transforms in the profession of historian, from work on sources to the structuring of the discipline itself.
It is not an easy task to write a book on how to do and write history: necessarily coming after a number of works which have covered our own studies, the book by Caroline Muller – main author – and Frédéric Clavert does not claim to replace them, but will now occupy a good place in the books recommended to apprentice historians. To present their point, the authors do not claim to universalize their position: this work is drawn from their particular experiences.
The project of this book is part of a long dynamic of reflections on the uses and epistemology of digital technology, to which Caroline Muller and Frédéric Clavert have contributed primarily, notably with the collective project The Taste of the Archive in the Digital Age (2017-2023). Beyond the research field of digital humanities stricto sensudigital technology has become omnipresent in all components of the teaching and research profession: the use of digital tools is part of the skills framework for licenses in France, digital deliverables are part of the expectations of a number of calls for projects. This book is, however, neither a digital humanities book nor a plea for the use of digital technology in research and teaching, and even less a guide to digital techniques and good practices. It offers a reflection addressed to the entire historical community, crossed by practices which quietly transform the relationship it maintains with documentation, writing and each other.
Renewed attention to documentation: against the “ black box »
This work rethinks the relationship with historical documentation, reread from the angle of the transformations induced by digital technology. This is the most successful point of the book, reflecting the authors’ first-hand reflections on their own documentation, archival and otherwise. The reflection starts from the central nature of the relationship with sources among historians, the emotions that one can feel when in contact with them as well as their importance in the construction of a professional identity. The chapters raise varied and detailed questions about what digital technology has necessarily transformed. The question of transcription, for example, clearly demonstrates this link between the technical and material process (taking photos and reading on screen rather than in the reading room) and intellectual (less systematic transcriptions and therefore a different, even more superficial, mode of appropriation of documents).
Drawing on developments in historiography – documentary turn, material turn, archival turn, transformations in quantitative methods, etc. –, the work insists on the importance of taking into account the document in its context, not only as a reservoir of data, but also in its materiality, in its exceptions. Developments linked to remote reading of documents, or even the very nature of natively digital sources, do not prevent particular attention to documentarization, or even to “ redocumentarization », concept used in the context of digital sources and encouraging us to pay attention to all the operations and manipulations carried out on these documents, from metadata to their very readability.
The authors thus plead for an explanation of “ black boxes » of digital, whether these are the choices making a digitization, the algorithm of a search engine or the functioning of a AI generative, in order to be aware of the possible biases of the documents discovered, the sampling logic and the methods of producing these tools. This requires real training, a general digital culture, but also a technical one as one progresses in the research work: the last chapter, proposing a digital curriculum and pedagogy in history studies, is particularly interesting in this sense.
This ethics of the relationship with documentation can finally willingly become political. The work does not avoid the power relations that cross the historical field and society. The digitization of archives is thus seen in a nuanced way. It can be an asset for rebalancing in favor of certain groups poorly represented in public archives: this is the case, for example, of the work carried out on the constitution and accessibility of archives. LGBT. It can also be a risk in the context of academic domination of the North over the South: this is the case, for example, of reflection on online access to Ethiopian documents which could accentuate the inequality between African and Western researchers. Attention to “ little hands » of digital technology, from digitization to mediation through scientific publishing, also invites us not to take our scientific practices as abstractions without impact and without link with real economic and social tensions.
Effects of digital technology on practice and discipline
To carry out these reflections, this work is based on a fundamental presupposition: our daily practices, material, technical, are not neutral on the intellectual level. This book therefore falls, sometimes more or less explicitly, in the wake of an anthropology of scientific practices, like the work of Françoise Waquet, The material order of knowledgewhich gives its title to the chapter VI.
The question of digital technology in fact raises more broadly the question of the technical conditions of research work and its conditions of possibility. The work of Ann Blair in particular was able to show how, in a completely different context, European printing had profoundly transformed the working methods of European scholars, requiring the creation of working tools facilitating the taking into account of a mass of new information and documentation. The anxiety generated by the influx of knowledge (“ Too much to know “) is not new, but finds solutions through the writing of general works such as universal libraries, individual or collaborative note-taking put into cards and classified according to systems that are sometimes very complex. It is a common trope today to compare the “ printing revolution » with the « digital revolution “, particularly in the way in which these two technical and media systems have gradually transformed our ways of reading, writing and communicating.
However, in both cases, continuities and permanences should not be undervalued. It is not certain that the extent of the transformation induced by digital technology affects the disciplinary foundations, as is suggested in the conclusion (p. 170) and sometimes mentioned throughout the text, notably for the question of documentary criticism (p. 77). By discussing a digitized image taken from the 2021 grievance books, the authors ask themselves: “ How did this image come to us? ? Through what manipulation, by which service providers ? Can we spot a dismemberment of the document, the preparation of an ocerization ? Answering these questions makes it possible to restore the precise context of production of the document and the transformations undergone during collection. “. Far from being new, these questions are essentially the same as those that can be asked of a dismembered and recomposed medieval register, of a reused epigraphic inscription or even of a modern copy of an older charter, even if the techniques necessary to answer them vary and the solutions, even the tinkering of the historical workshop, evolve over time.
Digital transformations guide our research questions and our methods, and this book works to raise healthy awareness on this subject. But it does not seem to me that the disciplinary foundations have been fundamentally disrupted, just as printing has transformed ways of working, without having been at the origin of major epistemological upheavals. This being said, nothing prevents this from happening, and perhaps other developments will produce more radical transformations: we have undoubtedly not yet measured all the implications of certain systems.
Towards a sociology and anthropology of historical practices
Since the 1980s and with a renewed interest more recently, sociology has also been interested, in the wake of Bruno Latour, in the processes of construction of scientific knowledge, in particular on the forms of interactions between non-human technical devices and human actors in the context of laboratories, as well as on the influence of modes of financing and recognition on scientific production itself. The question of the organization of research work, whether we choose the group or individual scale, is currently in full development. Works in history and sociology also approach scientific social worlds from a perspective often influenced by the work of Bourdieu, observing and analyzing the publications or trajectories of actors and the way in which scientific production strongly depends on implicit or explicit hierarchies, as well as access to certain financial and symbolic resources. Much work in the human and social sciences relies on documentation left by research projects and individuals. These studies are often prompted by the archiving of these research and researcher documents (the masculine is unfortunately not very generic), particularly within theIMEC and the Humathèque de Condorcet. In short, there is currently a convergence of interests, which goes well beyond the digital, to reflect on the conditions of knowledge production and firmly anchor scientific practices in the social and material world, rather than in the ether of “ big ideas “.
Dialogue with these areas of research in the human and social sciences undoubtedly exceeded the objective of this work, which also brings together numerous reflective comments from historians on their practice. The work by Caroline Muller and Frédéric Clavert maintains its particular focus on digital aspects, but included in the institutional inscription of research, the methods of financing by project or even the dependence on certain tools or platforms of GAFAM.
While waiting for studies that would allow these different areas of research, from diverse disciplinary traditions, to be put into dialogue, this work opens up avenues for common reflection: the bet is successful and the author of these lines took part in this discussion at a distance, far from the social networks from which the project of the Taste of the archive in the digital agein the hope that these reflections can give rise to fruitful exchanges within the classic or transformed networks of historical sociability.