A Portrait of the Historian as a Cyborg

What are the epistemological implications of new digital reading and writing technology that has appeared since the 1990s? The classical epistemology of history has scarcely ever considered the underlying technological conditions of its existence, since the system of the production and transmission of knowledge within which it was constituted at the end of the nineteenth century has seemed natural. But historians today can no longer conceive of working without the help of electronic applicata that give access to a variety of digital tools they use on a daily basis (library catalogs, digitalized books, online libraries, research blogs, and so on). The computer connected to the Internet has thus become an extension of the body (of knowledge) of the professional historian. The first part of the article situates the digital turn of the 1990s in the context of the computer revolution of the sciences during the latter half of the twentieth century, so as better to appreciate the novelty of the digital turn. The second half explores a repertoire of essential scholarly practices that have resulted from this revolution: the manipulation of archives and other written documents, scholarly communication, and the production of historical narratives intended for the scholarly community or for the general public.