ABSTRACT
This chapter explores opportunities and limits for the advancement of learning in historical sciences offered by computers. This chapter's starting point follows Braudel's 1960s vision of gathering the human sciences together with the help of computation and a new language that only history as an academic discipline could develop. The chapter offers an overview of when and how computers were introduced in the perennial historian's chase for the truth. Consequentially, the chapter reviews what a computational approach to history means by considering Stephen Wolfram's statement that the computational approach is different because of ‘the principle of computational equivalence’, which implies the phenomenon of ‘computational irreducibility’. The chapter ends with a final reflection on whether non-narrative computational history is possible.
