Digital humanities and development of the biographical method

Abstract

The article deals with the methodological foundations of the biographical method in the context of digital humanities. The bidirectional character of biography leads us to the problem’s methodological level: social predicament of the individual world and reciprocal determinability of the social world by the individual world. The biographical method is closely linked to thematization of subjectivity. The biographical method’ s methodological problems are connected with context, reference, authenticity, and reflexivity. The authors link the biographical method with memory studies and emphasize that the turn to memory is associated with many theoretical questions and controversies related to the status of history as a science and its relation to the field of human memory. The multidirectional biography studies reveal the lack of a conceptual apparatus, common for the interdisciplinary space of humanities, which allows to develop the criteria for comparability of scientific research results. The authors associate the further development of the biographical method with the development of the modern information society. They note the prospects of using the methods of digital humanities associated with the search, selection and analysis of texts presented in digital form. The rationale for this thesis is that at present there is a constant increase of electronic texts that can be used both for the development of the biographical method and serve as its empirical base. The article demonstrates the possibility of applying the biographical method using the tools of digital humanities on the examples of research on the history of science, which are part of the world’s cultural heritage.