Ce billet regroupe des éléments que j’ai utilisés pour le second jour du workshop #dhiha8. Vous trouverez les liens vers l’ensemble des billets sur le blog germanophone de l’institut historique allemand.

Three remarks and a regret:

1. A general remark

A general remark on the French blogposts: more men, more theory, more debate, in blogposts’ comments and/or on Twitter. German and English speaking blogposts are more centered on practical experiences, on tools (Twitter – Lena Oetzel and Levke Harders, Transkribus – Ina Serif and Pia Eckhart, 3D – Tobias Hodel), on project-oriented teaching too. Mareike wrote a blogpost that is based on Emilien Ruiz and Franziska proposition from 2011 in order to have a bridge between French blog posts and the others. The exception is maybe Stefania Scagliola’s text on the C2DH website.

2. The material condition and context of teaching digital stuff

Managing a classroom in a digital something course (Caroline Muller) / reflects also the reflexes students have when in front of a screen and the difficulties to «get of google out» of their (our) habtis. The material conditions of teaching: a room with computers, obligation to walk, etc (Caroline Muller), sometimes to walk out of the university (HistoriaApp, JAN NIKO KIRSCHBAUM)

3. The disciplinary question

The French debate partially (not only) focused on the non-existence of digital humanities or digital history as disciplines. I think it is not the main question but did have some problems to express it in the debates that we had on Twitter or while commenting blogposts.

4. A regret

One of the thing the debate on the French side showed is that the central question is not the disciplinary question but the question of the archive, of the primary sources, of the artifacts of the past. In a way, Dan Todman’s keynote was a quite good illustration of that. The allure of the archive in the digital era might still be the allure of the archive but the digital era might have change the concept of archive itself.

And I am not sure today that the concept of “archive” has the same meaning that it had “before” – “before” here meaning the way archive are showed, handeld in Arlette Farge’s Allure of the archive (the 1980s meaning of the archive) for instance.

There are more and more layers between us and the primary sources – of course archive centers are one of this layers, but the digital camera, servers, personal computers, and softwares. In terms of softwares, we are developing today an algorithmic layer that is thicker and thicker between us and the archive.

I really regret not to have written on that and on one important question which is: how to teach students to deal with those layers, how to teach them the history of those layers? Maybe a good subject for a workshop this afternoon.