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DH should apply to all history

I often envision history as a labyrinth. But instead of being far apart, the entrance and the exit are closer than you might expect, or what is at its heart may be something other than a center. The values of DH exposed in the Spiro article remind me that in the labyrinth of history, and in some way in its “center,” there can be something else. The explicit exercise of disentangling or resolving that a labyrinth poses is often inherent in history, and becomes more about the goal of finding the exit than the appreciation of experience, and in this sense experimentation. To propose a practice and implement a method that inspires experimentation embodies a combination of political gestures that traditional history may have moved away from due to the social hierarchies that the field has inherited.

The appreciation of experimentation is something lacking at the center of more traditional history. For example, I read the ongoing creation of values in DH as already having intent for experimentation. As words, material, objects, places, and categories are established and a routine for thinking is set in history, the experiential phenomena and the role of the sensed or spoken as a medium remain in many moments tied with historical hierarchies. For example, the idea of a laboratory for the exploration of methods is a set of actions that all historical studies should, in my view, have. This would motivate the possibility of not having an individual agenda, but rather a conjunction of questions and perspectives that do not necessarily look for specific answers, and in that process assemble a common practice that possibly can lead to open new ways to see social phenomena.