Suchergebnisse

The early phases of computer supported research in history have been characterized by enthusiasm about the many possibilities opened. Possibilities, which go beyond just one methodological paradigm as the recent discussions about the relative importance of quantitative studies within computer applications in history show. A deeper discussion about these developments is necessary, necessary for pure intellectual reasons as well as for ones within the politics of academia. This requires a theory of historical computing, which starts from an analysis of the differences between computing in history and computers' applications to other disciplines. To illustrate that, a number of examples are given, which show that the information presented by historical sources is inherently different from the one processed by information systems directed at current times.

The early phases of computer supported research in history have been characterized by enthusiasm about the many possibilities opened. Possibilities, which go beyond just one methodological paradigm as the recent discussions about the relative importance of quantitative studies within computer applications in history show. A deeper discussion about these developments is necessary, necessary for pure intellectual reasons as well as for ones within the politics of academia. This requires a theory of historical computing, which starts from an analysis of the differences between computing in history and computers' applications to other disciplines. To illustrate that, a number of examples are given, which show that the information presented by historical sources is inherently different from the one processed by information systems directed at current times.

Historians using computers to apply quantitative methods and historians using computers for other things have strained relationships. This is not the result of mutual bad will, but results from genuine differences between information as provided by contemporary phenomena and that derived from historical documents. Only after these differences are taken care of quantitative and other formal methods are methodologically safe. A tentative model for a possible solution of part of these problems by fuzzy logic is presented. More generally we discuss which developments are needed in the application of information technology to historical research to ease the strained relationship mentioned at the beginning.

The early phases of computer supported research in history have been characterized by enthusiasm about the many possibilities opened. Possibilities, which go beyond just one methodological paradigm as the recent discussions about the relative importance of quantitative studies within computer applications in history show. A deeper discussion about these developments is necessary, necessary for pure intellectual reasons as well as for ones within the politics of academia. This requires a theory of historical computing, which starts from an analysis of the differences between computing in history and computers' applications to other disciplines. To illustrate that, a number of examples are given, which show that the information presented by historical sources is inherently different from the one processed by information systems directed at current times.

Based on a description of the major design decisions going into the Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Colonensis (CEEC) project, the role of such internet based digital collections in Humanities' research and beyond is addressed. From that discussion theses are submitted regarding: the communities which should be addressed by such collections and how to address them; the minimum size such collections should have; the quality used for the display of the digitized material; the possibilities for addressing objects persistently; the digital environment, into which the actual digital collection should be integrated; the role of such collections in academic teaching.

Starting at the very end of the seventies a wave of criticism against quantitative studies can be observed. This, however, is not really directed against the quantitative methods, but part of a larger change of focus in History, which emphasizes an alleged contradiction between historical (as part of the Humanities) and the hard sciences. The paper refutes this position along two lines. Many of the alleged shortcomings of studies based on quantitative methods – as well as other methods requiring information technology – can be observed also in traditional historical research. Studies applying information technology find it much harder, though, to hide these shortcomings. More positive is another perspective: the kind of critique appearing now can be traced to difficulties in handling new types of historical sources, which became accessible recently – and can be handled only, if information technology is employed properly. This goes together with a decrease of the interest in general methodological reflection of historical sources as an intellectual domain. The historical disciplines should react to this do in this situation by a change of perspective. Historical methods emphasized so far the need to extract historical knowledge in situations where a lack of sources existed. Nowadays we need a methodology for deriving secured historical knowledge in situations where the problem is orientation within confusing and overwhelming masses of such sources.

The distrust many historians show when confronted with the results of quantitative studies is partially related to the experience, that many decisions which go into the preparation of historical sources for quantitative analysis are much more definite and final than the many uncertainties surrounding the meaning of terminology and statements in such sources actually justify. This is correct, but it is directed at the current stage of statistical studies, not at the nature of quantitative or formal reasoning as such. Fuzzy logic and fuzzy systems provide approaches, which could be harnessed to adapt statistical reasoning to the inherent uncertainties of historical data. The paper outlines the way in which this could be implemented with the help of examples drawn from the applications of statistics to social history.

Recent technical developments made it realistic that individual historians could have work stations on their desks, which would allow them access to multi-GB collections of archival documents in digitized form. The problem with such a collection is, that the information systems of different archives usually handle their archival material in such a way, that it becomes very hard to extract content from one of them and integrate them into a local information system optimized to support the research interests of a specific user. An architecture for information system is described, which maximizes the possibility to transfer documents between different such systems. This architecture is based upon the concept of digital objects representing individual documents which contain all the semantic information necessary to integrate them seamlessly into different information systems.

If we want to decide, whether two digital files contain exactly the same amount of information, or of how precisely the amount of information they contain differs, we need an abstract model of the information, unto which the instances represented by the content of two different files can be projected. A meta model for this purpose is presented. It differentiates between the byte values representing the payload in a file and the significant properties of that payload represented by meta information in the file. That model is embedded into a broader discussion of the best way to understand the nature of information as it influences the processing of the representations derived from the data in question. Links to the software solution implemented in the Planets project for the processing of data following the model proposed are provided.

The great effort necessary to make historical sources machine readable is a bottle neck for the application of computational methods in history. This makes their reuse for secondary analysis very important; at the same time electronic type setting as well as newly emerging OCR promise to make many more texts available for analysis than so far. As the variety of machine readable data is greater in the historical disciplines than in sociology, the data archives of sociology are only partially useful as model. At least four activities are needed to change the situation: an understanding of the data formats actually used, as well as a drive for standardizing them, organizing models for the preservation of these data for the long run and explicit training of younger researchers for the possibilities of secondary analysis. An agenda for an international workshop to address these problems is derived.

Attempts to apply the computer to historical research go back much longer than publicly perceived, a history of them is provided. At the moment the introduction of personal computers has brought the topic into the limelight. While the general interest of historians in the PC as a replacement for the typewriter is enormous, this does, however, not imply that the methodological possibilities inherent in information technology are embraced equally widely. Not the least reason for that is the almost complete lack of knowledge about the huge amount of relevant literature existing already; other reasons, rooted in the organization of historical research, are discussed. If the full potential of information technology for the historical disciplines shall be activated, systematic research in these possibilities and a more intimate type of interdisciplinary work with Computer Science will be needed.

To support several ongoing research projects the development of a general purpose system was started in 1978 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. This paper describes the second version of that system. Controlled by a simple scripting language, its most important features are: (a) a flexible input system combining free field and tag/content representation of data that can be structured in very complex hierarchies, (b) a retrieval system, (c) a system for the interactive coding of historical sources. (d) Various ways of entering codebook like "thesauri" provide a cheap way to recode as often as necessary material of doubtful semantics. (e) A system for nominative record linkage is provided which supports name comparisons by two classes of algorithms. Base algorithms can be adapted to suit the dialects of a particular area by a simple set of algorithm defining directives.

The author was one of the earliest representatives of computer applications within historical research in Germany, later being appointed to the first professorship for computer applications in the Humanities in Germany outside of linguistics. The following text describes his experiences as part of that development, which lead from the beginnings in the seventies to the current state of "Digital Humanties". His view on this development of an interdisciplinary area left him with rather mixed memories: behind a sparkling front story of an enfolding field, he frequently had the feeling, that there was a tendency to ignore the huge epistemic potential of a serious attempt to apply computer science to the field of history in favor of glamorous but shallow short term goals.