This is part three in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify from the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, Maria Damjanovicova (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) reports on the third of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Archive.

What has been the impact of biological data and digital media on the archive and on notions of human nature? In the first talk of this session, ‘Possibilities and Problems with the Growing Archive’, Michael Finn (Museum of the History of Science, Technology, & Medicine, University of Leeds) discussed the changes in how archives are used in research, and the relevance of archival material with the emergence of the digital. He focused on three sets of challenges: in questions of storage for example, digitisation introduces software and copyright issues, as well as a risk of information-loss when physical objects are digitised. In curation-related challenges, the role of the expert on historical subjects and historical expertise in archives is lost – together with a sense of what gets excluded from what is archived and unfiltered in search results. And in interpretation-related challenges, digitisation changes the way we view our archives, as it affects the relationship between what we want to study and what is accessible.

In ‘Molecular Archives of Human History: Moving Beyond Text-Based Sources,’ Jessica Hendy (Department of Archaeology, University of York) drew together a range of material and historical practices showing how, for example, cultural practice towards animals can be gauged through parchment analysis, how the molecular biography of a people (who did not have a chance to write their own history) can be learned from the remains of St. Helena slaves, and how the effects of nineteenth century urbanisation on disease, life, and diet, can be assessed from microbes contained in dental calculus. Hendy argued that the tools we use constrain and shape our research question, and that it is of vital importance to integrate biomolecular data with existing data sets to provide a holistic understanding of the past.

Elizabeth Toon’s (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester) ‘Matching the tools to the job, and not the other way round: Digital humanities and the history of the human sciences discussed the question of what digital humanities methods can do for historians of the human sciences. Toon discussed several projects that demonstrated digital humanities approaches to texts and data, and particularly offered insights from her experience of working on one such project – text mining ‘big data’ in the biological and biomedical sciences with the goal of creating a semantic search engine, which allows queries where categories are open. This process highlighted both the promises and perils of such approaches, including questions around revisiting methodologies, collaboration on big projects, and questions of transparency.

Questions raised in the discussion drew out the commonalities among these papers: how are we to move away from the social/biological dyad, and the categories set in the eighteenth century? How, if at all, do we differentiate between the data and the source, in the distinction between what is digitized and not analysed, versus what is simply not digitized? The question of the future of the history of the human sciences, which reverberated across all conference sessions, was posed as: is there another future for disciplinary collaboration beyond providing context? Is there such a thing as a “we” in shaping the future? Who is a part of that ‘we” and who is supporting it’?

Maria Damjanovicova is a PhD candidate in Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences (European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan) and she has a background in molecular biology and physiology (Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade). Her PhD project is focused on epigenetics and policy and it is an outgrowth of the Italian Epigenetics Consortium (EPIGEN) project on Public Engagement and Policy Work on Epigenetics.

(Image Credit: ‘Papyrus text: fragment of Hippocratic oath.’ Wellcome Library, London. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, No derivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.)