Veins filled with the Diluted Sap of Rationality

This article argues – in contradiction to the thesis developed by Rens Bod – that the hermeneutic tradition of humanities is not obsolete, especially when trying to understand the opportunities and challenges of using digital technologies for future research. The practice of digital history will have to be based on the critical analysis of the creation, enrichment, editing and retrieval of digital data as much as on the application of classical source criticism and historical contextualisation. If 'content' or rather 'data' is king in digital humanities, as imagined by Bod, context is its crown – at least for digital historians.

sentiment about the unlimited possibilities of the Internet and everything digital.5 Driven by a utilitarian logic and motivated by the ambition to create visibility in the 'economy of attention', Bod's provocative statements of 'the end of humanities 1.0' can be interpreted as a perfect embodiment of a specific state of mind within contemporary academia.A mindset that the Austrian Professor of Digital Methods in Architecture and Space Planning Georg Franck has aptly dubbed 'mental capitalism'.6 Despite the fact that the effect of this mentality -which has affected Dutch academia more strongly than other scientific cultures in Europe -would merit a sharp contestation at this point, in this reply I have to restrict myself to the discussion of two of Bod's main theses: first, his assumption that the so-called 'humanities 2.0' will be able to 'reconcile' the positivist or empiricist tradition of the natural sciences with the hermeneutic tradition of humanities; second, I want to question the narrow perspective of Bod's intellectual agenda when it comes to his central research question -the search for 'universal patterns' in intellectual, artistic or political 'products' (in his case, texts).

Humanities 2.0 as new scientific paradigm?
Exceptions prove the rule, but so far historians cannot be accused for being radical innovators when it comes to theoretical or methodological innovations in the field of digital humanities.Kiran Patel recently wondered about the 'collective silence' of the historical community when it comes to the dramatic impact of the Internet and digital technologies on the historian's profession.7 While archivists and cultural heritage institutions have been debating the  substantial impact of the digital revolution in their field with some passion 8 , historians as their professional users, have remained surprisingly silent on this question.Yet, according to Roy Rosenzweig, one of the pioneers of digital history, reflecting on the challenges with which the so-called 'digital revolution' is confronting the historical discipline is a matter of epistemological urgency: 'Historians need to be thinking simultaneously about how to research, write, and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future of record scarcity'.9 While the shift of sources from 'document' to 'data' has mainly been discussed in terms of scale, the epistemological implications of this ontological shift have been investigated less.10 As the digitisation process destroys the indexical relationship between a past historical reality and its physical imprint on a source (for example between the filmed reality and its physical imprint on the filmstrip), the concept of 'original' -so crucial in the emergence of history as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century -seems to lose its analytical potential.11 In both digitised and digital-born sources, the informationthrough a process of data processing -is encoded and not inscribed onto the materiality of a medium as it was the case in analogue printing, photography or film.12 The challenge of doing digital source criticism is therefore to keep track of this process of transcription -a highly complicated task considering Ladurie's famous prediction that 'l'historien de demain sera programmeur ou ne sera plus' 18 has proved to be wrong, and the fashion of cliometrics that dominated the field of history of economics in the 1970s is out-dated by nowdespite the new possibilities of the digital era.
Instead of predicting a paradigm shift, I argue that new tools and technologies in digital humanities will simply enrich our classical repertoire of source critique.While Bod has updated Dilthey's epistemic categories of 'understanding' and 'explaining' as paper tigers in order to destroy or reconcile them in a vague plea for a 'humanities 3.0', I argue that future generations of historians will have to be trained in the critical analysis of the creation, enrichment, editing and retrieval of digital data as much as in the classical internal and external source critique.This evolutionary perspective embedding the field of digital humanities within the heuristic tradition of critical history might be less fashionable than the current trend to use a revolutionary rhetoric when it comes to anything digital, but it is by no means less serious about the theoretical and practical impact of new digital technologies and the Internet on the historical profession and historical storytelling.

In search for 'universal patterns'?
Recognising that 'data' in humanities are complex, fuzzy and incomplete, it comes to a surprise that Bod's research programme for the humanities 2.0 looks rather simplistic.To a media historian like me, interested in the complex interrelationship between media technologies and infrastructures, mediated contents and their perception and cultural meaning, the search for 'universal patterns' in history makes little sense.Bod's research agenda for the 'humanities 2.0' reminds me of a positivist manifesto from the nineteenth century, translated into the digital jargon of the twentieth first century and driven by the idea (better: ideology) that digital technologies will finally offer the tools to detect and uncover the (so far hidden) logical foundations
Because codification means a process of interpretation and manipulation, digital history as a method has to reflect this ontological shift of the status of digital sources on two levels -on the level of classical source critique and on the level of historical epistemology.While I fully agree with Bod that dealing with digitised and borndigital sources ask for a new practice of doing history in the digital age, I'm fundamentally opposed to his interpretation (or better: prediction) that the hermeneutic tradition of humanities therefore has come to an end.Since its emergence as a professional and academic discipline in the nineteenth century, the practice of historical research has been closely linked to the development of new tools and technologies.14Because of the different nature of historical sources a variety of so-called historical 'Hilfswissenschaften' have emerged over the past centuries, basically aiming at applying the fundamental principles of historical source criticism to the specific medial nature of sources.New technologies have always impacted on the practice of the historian -be it in teaching, research or international collaboration, and the introduction of and socialisation with these facilities in return has always resulted in a tension between old and new user generations of specific technologies.That As the Canadian historians William Turkel and Alan MacEachern have argued, historians will have to develop these tasks in collaboration with technical experts in the field -otherwise they are in danger of having methods forced on them that are not compatible with their practice: 17 but this critical engagement with digital technologies does not imply that historians have to become programmers or IT specialists.As we know by now, Emmanuel Le Roy 8 Fiona Cameron (ed.), Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage (Cambridge ma 2010).9 Roy Rosenzweig,'Scarcity or Abundance?: Preserving the Past', in: Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (New York 2011) 6. 10 Jim Mussel, 'Doing and making: history as digital practice', in: Toni Weller (ed.), History in the Digital Age (London 2013)79-94.11 While the debate on originality of digital sources has produced some excellent scholarship that would certainly merit closer attention, I think that the concept of authenticity might be more appropriate to reflect the questions at stake.As a relational concept, authenticity problematises the relationship between 'the original' and 'the copy' in terms of mimetic features, for example in asking whether an interpretation of a text sticks to the author's intention or whether or not it is true to the original historical, social or cultural context.For a detailed discussion of the question of authenticity of digital objects see the interesting collection of articles in the volume Charles T. Cullen et.al., Authenticity in a Digital Environment(Washington D.C. 2000): http:// www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub92/pub92.pdf.See also Philipp Müller, 'Understanding history.veins filled with the diluted sap of rationality: a critical reply to rens bod fickers BMGN.2013.4.1911.indd157 20-11-13 10:28 the fluid nature of 'texts' or 'data' in the digital workflow.13 the 'analogue born' generation of historians might experience the current transitions in historical practice as more 'radical' or 'revolutionary' than the 'digital born' is a classic phenomenon of generational shift, but doesn't justify the prediction of an epistemological 'paradigm shift' in the humanities.15 As in the past, future historians cannot escape the productive confrontation with the new technical, economic and social realities.It is true that the historical discipline might have been more reluctant than other disciplines when it comes to the intellectual and practical appropriation of new digital tools and technologies.In my plea for a new 'digital historicism' therefore I emphasised the need for a critical engagement of the discipline with the many methodological and epistemological challenges of the digital era.16 This digital historicism should be characterised by a fruitful collaboration between archivists, computer scientists, historians and the forum BMGN.2013.4.1911.indd158 20-11-13 10:28 public.