2025/04/23 by Laurent Gauthier · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · doi:10.16995/dscn.18169
openalex publication_date 2025/04/23 · openalex created_date 2025/04/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Although ancient historians routinely create and exploit document corpora, and the notion of corpus is recognized as central in historiography, there has been little methodological focus on coming to a unified approach to the design and use of corpora. The massive expanse of digital information and processing capabilities over the past few years has also led to a diversity of approaches. After reviewing the history of the use of corpora in historiography, we examine how ancient historians have taken possession of digital practice, and how it has interacted with the notions and uses of textual corpora: there are many diverse and somewhat incompatible methodological perspectives on historical corpora. Next, we show how the textual corpus, as an input into historiography, cannot exist anymore as an object and must be seen as a process or a pipeline. Then, its multiple and sometimes opposite perceptions can be unified, at the same time making history more scientific in the sense of Lucien Febvre’s definition, for whom history is the scientifically elaborated narration of humankind’s activities.