Les enjeux épistémologiques des humanités numériques

Abstract

In the humanities, as in the “hard” sciences, for more than a decade now the massive digitalisation of texts and data has produced big data or long data opening up new opportunities for research. But the accompanying critical methods pose considerable epistemological, institutional and pedagogical issues. In what is now referred to as the “digital humanities” , the remote reading of a corpus constituted by maps and graphs provides a specific form of knowledge and a methodological and epistemological paradigm the heuristics of which must be grasped in all their potential. One must not allow oneself to be swept into the naïve belief that trawling a corpus of texts results in a transparent production of knowledge, a mass of data which remain silent artefacts in the absence of a specific hermeneutics.

Keywords

• big data
• digital humanities
• sciences of culture
• lexicography
• epistemology of the social sciences
• literary history