Vom Exzerpt zum Photoauftrag zur Datenbank

This paper addresses a topic that is not usually part of the history of historiography: technological developments. It starts from the obvious observation that historiography always takes place in a constantly changing and evolving environment of hardware, infrastructure, and machinery and argues that this environment significantly affects the methodological standards, research practices, and concepts of truth that guide historiography. One technological invention that obviously affected historiography very deeply was photography. Photos and images of documents had already been produced before the 19th century, mostly for purposes of paleographic training. Photography, however, opened entirely new possibilities. In the middle of the 19th century, photographic images became a key component of paleographic training in Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere. Soon, also paleographic research became dependent upon images, especially overseas where only few original documents were available for direct autopsy. Around 1900, photography also became part of historiographic research practices. Scholars started to combine personal travel to archives with requests for reproductions. Micro-filming made this even more popular, and from the 1930s onward commercial enterprises satisfied the need for an ever growing amount of archival images. Digital imaging, finally, opened an entirely new world of making and distributing pictures of documents. While initially hailed enthusiastically as enabling a much more rapid progress of higher-quality scholarship, recent authors have added also more cautious and skeptical voices to the evaluation of these technological developments

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Digitization · Epistemology · Historiography · Photography · Political science · Scholarship · Skepticism · Telecommunications · Visual arts · Archaeological Research and Protection · Computer Science · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · History · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture

• Facing the History Machine

  Gerben Zaagsma•History of Humanities•2024

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