L’article intitulé “The Use and Abuse of the Digital Humanities in the History of Ideas: How to Study the Encyclopédie” que Marie Leca-Tsiomis (Université Paris X Nanterre) vient de publier dans la revue History of European Ideas (4 mars 2013) nous alerte sur le mauvais usage qui peut être fait de l’informatique et des outils numériques dans le domaine de la recherche littéraire et historique et, plus particulièrement, de la recherche sur l’Encyclopédie. A lire de toute urgence !

L’article est consultable en version intégrale à l’adresse suivante : http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JHW539PsFVZI3baYcKUY/full

En voici le résumé :

New information technology can be an invaluable aid to research in the history of ideas provided it is built on scientific foundations. This article discusses the case of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and analyses its use of earlier dictionaries (the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and Moréri’s dictionary). It also shows how neglect of existing research in the history of ideas and ignorance of how these eighteenth-century European publications were elaborated, combined with inappropriate use of software for detecting plagiarism, have led to totally mistaken findings. These findings, widely publicised thanks to the Internet, constitute a real danger for future research. The article concludes that the intellectual community urgently needs to invest seriously in the digital humanities in order to safeguard future research.

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