Histonetica: A Relational Framework for the Systematic Analysis of Historical Knowledge Movements and Epistemic Infrastructures

Historical sources are predominantly examined as isolated discrete states—in archival boxes, as scans, PDFs, or scattered digitized items, each without systematic context. Digitization alone produces visibility, but not knowledge. Documents remain isolated, their relationships invisible. Histonetica addresses precisely this epistemic threshold. It is a methodological framework that does not merely digitize historical information, but systematically networks it, contextualizes it, and renders history comprehensible in its development. Three methodological innovations stand at its center: (I) a five-dimensional model that captures historical knowledge movements along the axes of time, space, actors, artifacts, and structures; (II) Histotrames as reconstructable pathways that reveal how objects, concepts, and actors move through different contexts; (III) data resonance as a procedure that renders visible not only patterns and fields of meaning, but also systematic absences. The approach enacts an epistemological shift: from primarily hermeneutic reconstruction of intentions toward structural analysis of conditions. Historical research traditionally asks: What happened and why did actors act as they did? Histonetica asks: What structural conditions made it possible for something to happen at all? The analytical focus thereby shifts from isolated events and individual intentions to relational processes and epistemic infrastructures. Rather than proceeding from individual historical centers, Histonetica renders visible how environments, funding networks, institutional structures, and global relationships interlock. Biographies become legible as pathways through epistemic infrastructures, scientific developments as functions of long-term enabling structures. The concept is not only theoretically elaborated but already implemented in a productive research environment. The underlying software architecture processes analog sources automatically, refines them through human editorial work into quality-assured full texts, and enriches them with relational metadata. All sources exist in machine-readable form—not as isolated PDFs, but as semantically networked knowledge objects. Through AI-supported translation, Histonetica extends access to historical sources across linguistic boundaries without altering the original and with permanent reference to the source. Using the subsidy files for Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti's botanical China expedition (1913–1928), this paper demonstrates how Histonetica renders visible institutional dynamics, long-term continuities, and systematic absences that remain hidden in traditional archival work.