Digital Humanities: Foundations

Open Access

Abstract

International audience ; We must keep in mind some numerical data when we evoke the transition from the paper to the digital age. In particular, the following contrast speaksfor itself:1. All the books ever written represent 50 billion bytes.2. The information produced in 2006 represents 150 quintillion (150 x 1018) bytes. That is to say, during 2006 alone, the world produced three milliontimes the informational content of all the books ever written.3. Things continue in this way at high speed: the only internet track of May 2009 has generated 500 billion bytes.Thus, our paper-based heritage is already a tiny fraction of what the human race has produced and this fraction decreases, relatively, every day. Viewingthese data, the conception of a digitization enterprise should be thought of and considered by humanists as enlarged. The narrow acceptance of theproject – the view that it is merely a technical process of converting our paper-borne heritage into electronic form – is dramatically insufficient. Toparaphrase Clemenceau's famous words about war and militaries, digitization may be too serious a thing to be left to the digitizers alone. Scholarsmust face the issue and understand it as one of the most important problems they have to deal with and, as I will argue, as a real opportunity to renewtheir practices and disciplines.