Assessing Implications of the Digital Turn in the Humanities for Memory Institutions

The digital turn has shaped the humanities in recent decades. Every kind of activity in research and teaching now has at least a digital component, even if this only implies using digital information infrastructures for research. In the historical scholarship, the will to persevere time honed approaches may be greater than in other disciplines, yet even here two trends have emerged in recent years: firstly, scholarship based on datafied surrogates of analogue sources is increasing-and will become even more important the more scholars work with digitally born sources. Secondly, the historical disciplines themselves are becoming producers of research data. This paper traces the transformation, illustrating current techniques, workflows, and their prerequisites arguing that memory institutions should not only not ignore the development, but that they form already an important part of the digital transformation. For memory institutions the digital turn is characterised by a convergence of data competencies as well as procedures and models across the traditional boundaries of the disciplines. Finally, the article reflects on how memory institutions can meet the requirements of this transformation and new groups of users and what challenges, of an epistemic nature as well, are inherent to the existing collections.