Foucault revisited for the Digital Humanities

Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, 1969

Review with respect to digital humanities (avant la lettre)

Also historians have succumbed to the temptations of structuralism. For quite some time now, they have not been working anymore with events, but with developments, including those of longue durée, as Ferdinand Braudel has called them. Michel Foucault speaks of deposits, layers, which are now being investigated: For example the history of the cereal or the gold mines, of the starvation or growth. In such a history we are no more talking about chains of events, but about series types and periodization.

Remark / interjection: According to the Google Ngram Viewer the term “event” was more frequently used than the term “structure” until the 1930th. Since 1965, the term “structure experiences a real hype.


This contrasts with the philosophy, which focuses its attention on fractures. Its interest is on the effects of interruptions and boundaries. The problem is no longer the foundation of a term or an and idea, but rather its transformation. In the center of the history of thought now is discontinuity.

What are the two developments based on? On challenging the document, Foucault says. The document was treated as “the language of the silenced voice”, as its decipherable trace. The document was a material through which the past should have been reconstructed. Historiography is now looking for relations in the documentary structure itself. It wants to give form to a mass of documents. So, documents become monuments and historiography becomes archeology – to an description immanent of the monument. Henceforth it is, as mentioned, all about series and about relations between these series.

Thus discontinuity is becoming the essential element – instrument and object – of the historical analyses. The possibility of a “global history” is being blurred in favor of the option of an “universal” (or “general”) history. It is about the overall shape of a culture, a system of homogenous relations that can be found in all areas of society. Thus the “new history” encounters the problem of constructing coherent document corpuses; the problem of the selection principle; of specifying methods of analysis; of the delimitation of quantities that structure the material to be examined.

The “general” or “new history” leaves all questions about the teleology of becoming and the relativity of historical knowledge in favor of questions that are to be found in linguistics and anthropology – in short: in structuralism. This gives the tension between structure and history a new meaning.

This change in the episteme is not complete yet. Until now, history was a correlate of the subject; Its function was to maintain the sovereignty of the subject against all decentering: Historiography set the rationality of the telos against the analysis of the conditions of production by Marx, of the psyche by Freud and of transcendence by Nietzsche. A history that is not incision but becoming, not system but labor on freedom. And this history which is related to the synthetic activity of the subject disappears, as already mentioned before.

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Historiography is detached from a whole complex of terms (and ideas): “Tradition”, for example, allowed to consider the dispersion of history in the form of the same; “influence” brought similar phenomena into connection with a process of causality; “development” related a sequence of events dispersed in time and space to a single organizational principle, and from there to a hypothetical origin and end; “mentality” established a community of sense, allowed as a unifying principle the existence of a collective consciousness. Even the units “book” and “work” are not backed up: A certain number of characters mark the boundaries of a text and a certain number of texts can be assigned to an author, indeed; but: the discursive unity of a text is never clean and severely cut, it is a knot in a net in which one text refers to others texts. Foucault wants to have a “pure description of discursive events” as a horizon for the study of a particular object.

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 Archeology in the meaning of Foucault defines discourses as practices obeying certain rules. The discourse is not a document, a sign for something else, but a monument. The archaeology defines types and rules of discursive practices that “pass trough” original works. How this archaeology is going to treat change, the phenomena of succession and alteration? How does it structure the relation between diachrony and synchrony? If a particular discursive formation just enters at the place of another – is time then not simply being bypassed, does then the possibility of a historical description not simply disappear?

The archaeology – always in Foucault’s sense – defines the rules of the formation of a set of statements and their correlation to the events. It distinguishes several levels: the level of the statements; the level of appearance of the objects, of the types of statements, of the terms; the formation level of new rules; and the level of substitution of a discursive formation with another. Thus, science is emerging on the threshold of the 19th century. The amount of discursive elements that is necessary to constitute science is knowledge. Instead of the axis consciousness – knowledge – science, that keeps to the subject, Foucault’s archaeology follows an axis discursive practice – knowledge – science. What it describes is not science in its specific structure, but the field of knowledge.

L’archéologie du savoir is neither historiography nor philosophy. It is a discourse about discourses. It describes the decentration, which would recognize no place, no subject as a privilege. The discourse has not the task “to dissolve the oblivion and to recover in the depth where they are silent, the moment in which things have been said”. It does not collect the original, does not remember the truth, is not the “presence of history in its conscious form”.

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 What does it mean for the Digital Humanities, to “visit” Michel Foucault again? His archéologie du savoir confirms the decentration that we have found with Jacques Derrida, the importance of structure, discontinuity in history and the fracture in the episteme. In addition to this it deconstructs the meaning of the document and of the terms used in the “old historiography”. On the other hand, it constitutes discursive practices whose position in opposition to the events is rather vague. But these discourses are not sign and play as with Derrida. And they give the subject no consolation as the “old history” did. Knowledge has no purpose outside of itself. It emerges and vanishes in ever new formations. If we follow its traces and think and write about it, we are creating at best a new branch of a particular discursive formation. No matter whether analog or digital. Foucault deals with statements, in any form. The acceleration and liquefaction of discourses that impress Wolfgang Schmale, would have confirmed Foucault in his analysis of the episteme. He knew that texts are knots in a net of discursive practices, as in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book “In 1926”, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to find them on a screen. L’archéologie du savoir is a text that in its depth would have absorbed the digital revolution without much further notice.

Quelle: http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280

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ORBIS – The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

http://orbis.stanford.edu/ Im letzten Post hatte ich es schon angekündigt, jetzt ist ORBIS - The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World online. "ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the

Quelle: http://geschichtsweberei.blogspot.com/2012/05/orbis-stanford-geospatial-network-model.html

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ORBIS – The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

http://orbis.stanford.edu/ Im letzten Post hatte ich es schon angekündigt, jetzt ist ORBIS - The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World online. "ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the

Quelle: http://geschichtsweberei.blogspot.com/2012/05/orbis-stanford-geospatial-network-model.html

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Tagungsbericht: „Die Universität Kiel und ihre Professorinnen und Professoren oder: Wozu den Kieler Professorenkatalog?“

Interdisziplinäre wissenschaftliche Fachtagung, 20./21.04.2012

Abteilung für Regionalgeschichte an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in Zusammenarbeit mit der Gesellschaft für Kieler Stadtgeschichte

Bericht von Torsten Roeder, 24.04.2012

In der Kunsthalle zu Kiel veranstaltete die Abteilung für Regionalgeschichte des Historischen Seminars der Christian-Albrechts-Universität am 20. und 21.4.2012 die Tagung „Die Universität Kiel und ihre Professorinnen und Professoren oder: Wozu den Kieler Professorenkatalog?“ (siehe Pressemitteilung). Zwei volle Tage referierten und diskutierten Vertreter aus den traditionellen Geisteswissenschaften und aus den Digital Humanities über verschiedene Professorenkataloge und Kieler Professorenbiographien von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart der Universität. Da dieser Bericht vor allem auf die Fragen und Belange der Digital Humanities eingehen wird, ist an dieser Stelle zu entschuldigen, dass die geschichtswissenschaftlichen Beiträge nicht in ihrer vollen Tiefe berücksichtigt werden können.

Dass der Tagungstitel nicht nur aus rhetorischen Gründen gewählt wurde, zeigte die Auswahl der Referenten, die einerseits landesgeschichtliche Biografik, andererseits laufende Katalogprojekte und datenbankgestützte Forschung vertraten (siehe Tagungsprogramm auf H-Soz-u-Kult). Während der Mehrwert von prosopographischen Katalogprojekten aus Sicht der Grundlagenforschung und der institutionellen Standortbestimmung prinzipiell kaum infrage gestellt wurde, nahmen die landesgeschichtlichen Beiträge nur in der Minderzahl auf diese Kataloge Bezug. Den generellen Eindruck, dass Katalogprojekte und Geschichtsforschung zwar einen gemeinsamen Gegenstand behandeln, sich ansonsten aber unabhängig voneinander positionieren, konnten insbesondere die Beiträge von RAINER SCHWINGES, ULF MORGENSTERN und SARAH ORGANISTA souverän ausräumen. Insofern fand die thematische Aufteilung, welche sich im Tagungstitel bereits durch das „oder“ andeutet, tatsächlich ihren Niederschlag in einem Diskurs, der aber letztlich viele Verbindungsmöglichkeiten zutage brachte. Die Beiträge von HOLGER GAST und JOHANNES MIKUTEIT schlugen ihrerseits Brücken zur Informationstechnologie und zu den Digital Humanities und schlossen damit begriffliche Leerfelder; ebenso die Beiträge von BERNHARD EBNETH und BARBARA PFEIFER, deren Beiträge auf verschiedene Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten eingingen.

weiterlesen auf digiversity.net …

 

Quelle: http://dhd-blog.org/?p=441

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Tagungsbericht: „Die Universität Kiel und ihre Professorinnen und Professoren oder: Wozu den Kieler Professorenkatalog?“

Interdisziplinäre wissenschaftliche Fachtagung, 20./21.04.2012 Abteilung für Regionalgeschichte an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in Zusammenarbeit mit der Gesellschaft für Kieler Stadtgeschichte Bericht von Torsten Roeder, 24.04.2012 In der Kunsthalle zu Kiel veranstaltete die Abteilung für Regionalgeschichte des Historischen Seminars der Christian-Albrechts-Universität am 20. und 21.4.2012 die Tagung „Die Universität Kiel und ihre Professorinnen und Professoren oder: […]

Quelle: http://digiversity.net/2012/tagungsbericht-professorenkataloge/

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Microsoft Academic a more powerful tool than Google Scholar, but…

While googling ‘Google Scholar Metrics’ for my post two weeks ago, I discovered Microsoft Academics. As with other project such as Bing Maps, Microsoft tries to compete with Google. And as Google, Microsoft seems to label now every new service it offers ‘beta’. Microsoft Academic offers immediately several (visualisation) tools that Google Scholar doesn’t such as h-index, genealogy maps, co-authors maps, academic maps…

But the major problem with Microsoft Academic is its database. If Google Scholar does cover quite a large field – even most of the articles published by a historian on psychiatry are referenced – Microsoft Academic seems not to be particularly strong for the humanities. So most of the nice tools proposed by Microsoft Academic are not very useful.

I must have however admit that the list of the most important journals in history, proposed by Microsoft Academic, does already be closer to my personal list, even if it continues to overrate the journals dedicated to the sciences studies, which appear central in the history field on Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic but are rather marginal in the universities.

 

 

Quelle: http://majerus.hypotheses.org/402

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Deux nouveaux blogs suisses sur l’histoire numérique

Deux nouveaux blogs rédigés par des chercheurs suisses ont vu le jour ces dernières semaines sur la plateforme de carnets de recherche hypotheses.org:

We think History

Quelle place devraient avoir les blogs dans la communication académique ? Cette question, souvent débattue dans les forums des Digital Humanities, est le sujet du dernier billet du blog We think History.

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Quelle: http://www.infoclio.ch/de/node/26343

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Deux nouveaux blogs suisses sur l’histoire numérique

Deux nouveaux blogs rédigés par des chercheurs suisses ont vu le jour ces dernières semaines sur la plateforme de carnets de recherche hypotheses.org:

We think History

Quelle place devraient avoir les blogs dans la communication académique ? Cette question, souvent débattue dans les forums des Digital Humanities, est le sujet du dernier billet du blog We think History.

Weiterlesen

Quelle: http://www.infoclio.ch/de/node/26343

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