Peter Haber, Digital Past, Geschichtswissenschaft im Digitalen Zeitalter, München 2011
Review
“What happens to the historiography in the digital age”, Peter Haber, Basel University, wants to know. His concern is primarily about three things: The origins of electronic data processing in the historical sciences, the changing of the production of historical knowledge and the emerging of a new “Workshop of the Historian” (Marc Bloch). Continue reading
Alain Desrosières, La Politique des Grands Nombres, Histoire de la raison statistique, Paris 1993, 2000
Review with respect to the Digital Humanities
Numbers and statistics are an extremely important element in the Digital Humanities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine writes, after the Digital Humanities Conference 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, of the empirical turn in the humanities. High time, then, to read the classic book of Alain Desrosières again (this is also true for Theodore M. Porter’s Trust in Numbers, of course). It is about the social world as a construct, about calculating probabilities, mean values, the law of large numbers, nominalism and taxonomy, the history of the statistics in different countries (France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States), (sample) surveys, econometrics and about the prediction of a victory of the Republicans that was wrong because the survey has been made by telephone. Continue reading
