In French history textbooks published after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, the presentation of the war and its outcome frequently include the myth of France's revanche and depictions of the Prussian enemy as barbarians. Other textbooks presented a narrative of progress in which the French Third Republic is shown as the endpoint of a process of advancing civilization. While the idea of a French revanche can be regarded as a founding myth of the Third Republic, the narrative of progress can be seen as an echo of this myth, cleansed of the concept of the enemy as barbarian, which constitutes a national master narrative.

This article introduces a frame of reference for understanding the fundamental challenges that inform digital humanities as an interdisciplinary research area between arts, humanities, information, and computer science. Its conclusions are based upon the evidence base developed within an EU-funded collaboration known as Knowledge Complexity, or KPLEX for short (www.kplex-project.eu), in particular via the project’s thirty-eight linked interviews about big data research. When viewed from the perspective of the digital humanities, five distinct points of ‘aporia’ with a significant impact on digital humanities (DH) appear in this corpus, places where the interviewees explicitly or tacitly expose gulfs between the epistemic cultures that contribute to DH and that create tensions between these disciplines, even as they seek to collaborate. This article will explore these areas of apparent irreconcilability, and conclude with a series of reflections on how digital humanities researchers might build upon their unique competency profile to negotiate within these critical conversations, in particular in the framework of the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Trinity College Dublin, DARIAH-EU and the European Commission. This book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, and the biases and assumptions that drive us. Focusing on areas such as data and language, data and sensemaking, data and power, data and invisibility, and big data aggregation, it demonstrates that humanities research, focussing on cultural rather than social, political or economic frames of reference for viewing technology, resists mass datafication for a reason, and that those very reasons can be instructive for the critical observation of big data research and innovation.

The CENDARI infrastructure is a research-supporting platform designed to provide tools for transnational historical research, focusing on two topics: medieval culture and World War I. It exposes to the end users modern Web-based tools relying on a sophisticated infrastructure to collect, enrich, annotate, and search through large document corpora. Supporting researchers in their daily work is a novel concern for infrastructures. We describe how we gathered requirements through multiple methods to understand historians’ needs and derive an abstract workflow to support them. We then outline the tools that we have built, tying their technical descriptions to the user requirements. The main tools are the note-taking environment and its faceted search capabilities; the data integration platform including the Data API, supporting semantic enrichment through entity recognition; and the environment supporting the software development processes throughout the project to keep both technical partners and researchers in the loop. The outcomes are technical together with new resources developed and gathered, and the research workflow that has been described and documented.