Two Historians Relationship with Sources in the Digital Age

Luca Federico Cerra and Sean Takats, Université du Luxembourg (Luxembourg)

This paper examines the annotation practices behind DHARPA (the Digital History Advanced Research Accelerator project) and its innovative data orchestration tool, kiara. By focusing on the importance of annotation across various stages of research, kiara aims to enhance transparency and traceability in humanities research. Kiara’s design draws on the wide range of research experiences of the project’s team members and its collaborators. Here we explore two specific research problems experienced by this paper’s authors: Takats’s research on colonial medical practitioners involves the identification of geographic patterns of expert knowledge production and circulation; Cerra seeks to highlight the interactions between craftsmen and administrators in Revolutionary France, thus, uncovering a network of exchanges involving family, neighborhood, or professional ties. In both cases, our research depends not just on the creation, analysis, and visualization of data drawn from archival sources and finding aids, but also on the careful supervision and documentation of the decisions made along the way. Kiara aims to assist this process through a combination of automated and intentional annotation. Our paper considers the complexity of developing software which promotes critical reflection rather than simply racing to a solution.

Sean TAKATS leads the Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA) at the Centre luxembourgeois d’histoire contemporaine et numérique (C²DH). He is currently Professor of History and FNR PEARL Chair at the University of Luxembourg. Until 2019 he was Associate Professor at George Mason University and Director of Research at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Director of Zotero and Tropy, he is president of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship.

Luca Federico CERRA is a doctoral researcher in modern history at the C²DH. He is writing a thesis in cotutelle with the University of Namur on the causes and consequences of the abolition of guilds in Luxembourg at the end of the 18th century. Specialized in economic and social history, as well as the history of emotions and mentalities, he is also involved in the DHARPA digital humanities project, and is a member of the “aRaiRe”cluster.