Towards digital hermeneutics in history

The book "Towards a digital hermeneutics in history" argues that the doing contemporary history in the 21st century as academic practice requires an update of its traditional hermeneutics to the digital reality of the historians work and research environment. It builds on recent developments in “digital hermeneutics” and explores the possibilities of combining knowledge in the field of historical information science with “classical”forms of historical knowledge production by focusing on questions of the creation, retrieval, enrichment, editing, analysis and recontextualization of digitized or digital born sources. Based on a reflection on what kind of skills historians of the 21st century need in order to produce critical scholarship, the book aims to discuss the following key questions:

• How does digitization affect the notion and role of archives and how does it change the ontological status of “sources” by turning them into “data”?
• What new heuristics of search are needed in the age of big data and how to train our students in “algorithmic criticism”?
• How to implement a critical reflection on the use of tools for searching (“algorithmic criticism”), analysing (“tool criticism”) and interpreting (“digital hermeneutics”) of digital data in humanities scholarship?
• How to deal ina digitally “updated” hermeneutic tradition with the problem of authenticity or “data integrity” of digitized sources?
• What new forms of storytelling can/should we produce and how does the public engagement with history online lead to a renegotiation of the relationship between “professional” and “amateur” historians?
• What new didactic of teaching and learning do digital environments enable for different groups of pupils / students?
• How to deal with the “wisdom of the crowd” in digital scholarship and to develop public history projects that engage a larger public?
• How to study the “trading zone” and “boundary work” of knowledge production in digital historyprojects and initiatives where different epistemic cultures and communities of practice meet?