Historians and Technology / Les historiens et la technologie

Abstract

Historians for the most part tend to resist generalizations, save for one, that historians don’t like generalizations. That point being conceded, I’m going to offer another one: historians don’t like computers much either. There are all sorts of reasons, some historical, some cultural, for why this is so. But the fundamental reason, I think, rests on the mental map most of us have when we think about computation. Put simply, it lies on the periphery of the fundamental tasks – be they in research and analysis, or teaching and communication – that we identify with being historians. Most of us have nothing against computing, per se. It just isn’t relevant to what many of us conceive to be the proper tasks of scholars who deem themselves to be humanists.