CRIHN Conference "Des territoires de l’histoire ? A la recherche des pratiques numériques discrètes"

• Date: March 21, 2025
• Place: Room C-2059, Carrefour des arts et des sciences (3150 Jean Brillant Street, Université de Montréal) and online
• Speaker: Caroline Muller (Université de Rennes 2)
• Link to the recording: https://www.crihn.org/nouvelles/2025/03/31/video-de-la-conference-de-caroline-muller-u-de-rennes-2/

As part of her stay as a visiting researcher at our center, Caroline Muller (Université de Rennes 2) will give a talk entitled "Des territoires de l’histoire ? A la recherche des pratiques numériques discrètes" on Friday, March 21 2025.

Abstract

For many years now, research in the humanities and social sciences has been profoundly transformed by the digitization of our practices, particularly following the development of the personal computer. This digitization has gradually extended to increasingly broader areas of research, eventually leading to the establishment of an entire field dedicated to these possibilities: the digital humanities.

The significant achievements of this field have, however, sometimes overshadowed key transformations in how we handle documentation and sources—changes that remain under-documented. For instance, we still know little about how search engines influence our methodological choices, or about the impact of smartphones, or the software tools used to manage personal research data—not to mention the use of "Control + F" to retrieve keywords from the depths of our data layers.

The transformative power of these discreet, everyday digital practices in the humanities and social sciences has rarely been questioned. Based on a long-term research project conducted with Frédéric Clavert, my talk will explore these new research gestures, situated between the search for sources, corpus construction, and writing.