Digitality as a longue durée historical phenomenon

Abstract

The digital age introduced the Digital Ecological Niche (DEN), revolutionizing human interactions. The advent of Digital History (DHy) has marked a methodological shift in historical studies, tracing its roots to Babbage and Lovelace’s 19th-century work on “coding” as a foundational communication process, fostering a new interaction paradigm between humans and machines, termed “person2persons2machines.” This evolution, through digitization and informatization, builds upon ancient coding practices but was significantly advanced by Babbage and Lovelace’s contributions to mathematical linguistic systems, laying the groundwork for Computer Science. This field, central to 20th-century mainframe interaction through programming languages and formalization, situates Digital History within a broader historical context. Here, coding and mathematical methodologies empower historians with advanced technologies for historical data preservation and analysis. Nonetheless, the extent to which computation and Turing machines can fully understand and interpret history remains a subject of debate.

Keywords

• encoding
• digitalization
• digital ecological niche (den)
• punched cards
• abstraction
• babbage
• lovelace