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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Salvatore Spina
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DOI:10.17265/2159-550X/2026.02.003
University of Catania, Catania, Italy
This article synthesises the theoretical framework of my paper “Il documento digitalizzato, tra ricerca storica, Archivistica e intelligenze artificiali”, which was discussed at the round table entitled “Beyond the Boundaries of the Past: Innovation and Interaction in the Age of Digital Archives”, held on 4 June 2025 in Modena, Italy, as part of the Seventh National Public History Conference of the Italian Association of Public History (AIPH), Storie in cammino. The paper deals with the current transformation of historical research through digital technologies, which cannot be adequately understood if “digitisation” denotes merely the conversion of analogue objects, signals, and documents into digital formats. Instead, it proposes a shift toward a notion of digitisation oriented explicitly toward computation, understood as the formalisation, structuring, and operationalisation of historical knowledge in ways that make it interrogable by machines without relinquishing its interpretive complexity. Taking the history of slavery as a sample phenomenon of observation, the paper situates contemporary digital projects within the long historiographical tradition of histoire sérielle, reinterpreted as a computational epistemology rather than a purely quantitative method. Through the analysis of invented archives, historical data infrastructures, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools—particularly generative models—the paper aims to demonstrate that the decisive challenge for Digital History (DHy) lies not in technological adoption but in the construction of epistemically robust workflows, ontologies, and datasets. By engaging with the theoretical legacy of Richard Ennals and current debates on datafication and AI, the paper contends that only a computation-oriented approach to digitisation can ensure transparency, reproducibility, and critical control over historical knowledge in the “iAge of intelligent machines”.
datafication of historical knowledge, computational epistemology, historical data infrastructures, serial modelling, machine-readable historiography
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