Tradigital Humanities: Experiences in a context of change.

Abstract

Assuming one of Seneca’s proverbs — while we teach, we learn — we must understand the historian’s trade as a profession in continuous renewal, nurturing ourselves with new aspects that improve the methodology and techniques of science, while discarding those that become obsolete. For three decades, the provision of methodologies originating from other disciplines, such as computer science and Humanities studies, have been converging into the discipline known as Digital Humanities.

Although these computational techniques have introduced new methods for the identification of patterns in data and promise to accelerate the processes of analysing the growing mass of data, they diverge from the traditional narrative and its methods. In this sense, recent experiences allow us to discuss the benefits and limits of the link between traditional methods and techniques on the one hand, and those that are computational on the other, when preparing scientific results. Thus, we believe that without losing sight of the historian’s basic essence of continually immersing themselves in the reading and analysis of sources, the paradigm shifts of science can be assumed adopting this new technique.

Now, with perspective, we look at the limits that convergence itself offers, and here present our most recent experience to improve its performance.