The thematic section “Technology and the Making of History” of the fifth issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) explores how technology has shaped historical knowledge production, addressing why this material dimension remains underexplored in historiography. From the late nineteenth century onward, tools like photography, microfilm, punch cards, digital databases, computational methods, and most recently AI have enabled, constrained, and intertwined with historians’ practices across national contexts. Grounded in the praxeological turn in the history of humanities, knowledge, and digital history, the contributions challenge intellectual-material and analogue-digital binaries. Historians’ work has always been technically mediated, reflecting agency and culture, not ruptures. It highlights data continuities (excerpts to databases), selective uptake (e.g., 1950s social-scientific history), and reliance on infrastructures like critical editions.
By weaving technology into the cultural history of intellectual practices, the special section equips historians, digital humanists, students, and knowledge scholars with critical tools to reassess how knowledge about the past is made, circulated, institutionalized, and transformed amid ongoing computational and infrastructural shifts—fostering nuanced, empirically grounded research agendas for the field.
