Open or Close Research Instruments? Conflicting Rationales in the Organization of Early Digital Medieval History in Europe (1960–1990).

From the late 1940s onwards, humanities scholars used computers in order to create new types of research instruments, e.g., databases, digital scholarly editions of texts and/or archives, computer programs, etc. Their ambitions in doing so consisted in saving time in tedious, repetitive and error-prone scholarly tasks, enhancing the circulation of data and/or scholarly information, or even contributing to the progress of an entire discipline. Sharing these research instruments with interested colleagues was then crucial for these scholars. However, each of these humanities computing collectives developed at the time its own idiosyncratic procedures for editing, analyzing, and publishing computer-recorded material. This profoundly affected the possibility for these research instruments to circulate among scholars. In this article, I present how medievalists debated about a possible circulation of these digital research instruments in that context, and how it contributes to the development of an early humanities computing organization in Europe. I show how medievalists’ ambitions raised a whole series of material and intellectual difficulties which are still essential in our current DH practices and organizations. What data should we edit (and thus, what data are worth sharing)? In what form should we publish these datasets? And do we need common rules for this purpose? I argue that a precise history of early DH communities highlights a strong continuity with contemporary DH issues as well as the importance of historical studies of our field.