Abstract
Big Data is not a new phenomenon. History is punctuated by regimes of data acceleration, characterized by feelings of information overload, social transformation and invention of new technologies. During these moments, private organizations, administrative powers and sometimes isolated individuals have produced important datasets organized following a - now often superseded but nevertheless - coherent logic. To be translated into relevant sources of information about our past, these document series need to be redocumented using contemporary paradigms. The intellectual, methodological and technological challenges linked with this translation process are the central subject of this article.
Highlights
The future of cultural heritage in the digital era goes beyond the technical questions related to the digitization of objects and documents
How far can we apply the logic of contemporary datasets to redocument large corpora of information produced several centuries ago? For instance, would it be possible to reconstruct social networks for certain periods of the past with the same information density we experience in social networks of the present? Along that same line of thinking, would it be possible to add a slider to a contemporary geographical information system interface and look at a particular place as if it were 5, 50, or even 500 years ago? Does enough data of the past exist to realize such applications? Or are these just anachronistic questions, a common form of “presentism” (Hull, 1979; Hartog, 2003; Bourne, 2006)?
It is based on the hypothesis that data bigness is relative and that history is punctuated by several Big Data moments which are characterized by a widespread, shared sense of information overload alongside rapid societal acceleration accompanied by the invention of new intellectual technologies
Summary
Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Big Data is not a new phenomenon. History is punctuated by regimes of data acceleration, characterized by feelings of information overload accompanied by periods of social transformation and the invention of new technologies. During these moments, private organizations, administrative powers, and sometimes isolated individuals have produced important datasets, organized following a logic that is often subsequently superseded but was at the time, coherent. The intellectual, methodological, and technological challenges linked to this translation process are the central subject of this article. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cultural Heritage Digitization, a section of the journal Frontiers in Digital Humanities.
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