Historical Roots of Information Sciences and the Making of E-Humanities

Information scientist Christine Borgman in Scholarship in the Digital Age distinguishes between data used by natural scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars and discusses the implications hereof for their research practices. The analysis of these practices in combination with information technology must in her view result in an infrastructure for digital scholarship to facilitate distributed, collaborative, multidisciplinary research and learning that relies on large volumes of digital resources. ¹ The distinction in data that Borgman mentioned has been used as one of the arguments to explain why scholars in the humanities and social sciences make less use of digital infrastructures and tools than those in the natural sciences. ² However, the roots of library and information sciences that emerged as disciplines from the end of the nineteenth century onward can be found in the humanities and social sciences. Whereas there is a vast bibliography of the history of information science and technology, only recently a research project was set up to uncover the history of computing in the humanities by interviewing prominent members of this scholarly community. ³ However, a systematic study of the e-humanities, similar to one of the humanities by Rens Bod or in ‘The Making of the Humanities’ series of which this publication makes part, still lacks. ⁴ It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to write such a study. This chapter focuses on shifts in the relation between the history of the information sciences and of the e-humanities and their common roots.