Since Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), digital forensics became not only a toolset for born-digital archiving and philology, but also a shifted the perspective on the digital cultural heritage of our times and on questions of the “burdens of proof” under the digital condition. This lecture endeavors to shed light on the impact of digital forensics on the historical humanities, discussing sample cases and arguments about born-digital historical primary sources. It will make the case that digital forensic literacy and historical computing knowledge will have to be key components in historical humanities education and political discourse.
Thorsten Ries is a Postdoctoral Researcher (FWO) at the Institute of Modern German Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He studied and worked at Hamburg University and JHU Baltimore. His main research areas are German literature of the 18. and 20.-21. century (Thomas Kling, Gottfried Benn, Friedrich Hölderlin, and others), theory, methodology and practice of scholarly editing, genetic criticism, digital humanities, literary theory, methodology and discipline history of the “Germanistik”. At present, he is working on applications of digital forensics in philology, textual and genetic criticism and bibliography.
