Edgar Lejeune: Is Cumulativity of Knowledge just an Epistemological Chimera?

This presentation was part of the "Open Research Colloquium Digital History" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, held on May 14, 2025. Edgar Lejeune delivered a talk titled "Is Cumulativity of Knowledge just an Epistemological Chimera? Perspectives from the History of Digital Medieval History (1960–2020)."

Lejeune explored how the early hopes of digital history pioneers—who believed computers would enable cumulative knowledge production in medieval history—have evolved over time. Drawing on three historical case studies (ARTEM, MEDITEXT, and the 1427 Catasto database), he argued that while the broader discipline may not have fulfilled the vision of cumulative digital knowledge, significant practices around the creation and transmission of digital corpora have shaped historical research in important ways. He proposed that analyzing "corpus practices"—the ways historians assemble and use document collections—offers a better perspective on cumulative developments than focusing solely on the transmission of computational methods.

For more details, please refer to the abstract of the talk: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/10154

The program for the Open Research Colloquium Digital History for the summer term 2025: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/digit...

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