- If historiography is the first derivative of history, Historiomics is the second derivative of history;
- QUESTION: How does Historiomics differ from Cliometrics, Cliodynamics, or Historical Dynamics?;
- ANSWER: Historiomics generalizes to ALL manners of immutable append-only transaction logs, i.e. “Event Stores”;
- Think: The algorithms of history. Historiomics studies the distributed public ledger systems across human history;
*These include but are not limited to:
- Culture and human history itself;
- Science and the arts, design, engineering;
- Traditions in general, religious and otherwise; *Institutions in general, religious, political, economic, social, etc.
A Thought Experiment:
- What if we assumed a certain fiction as real and worked with that?;
- Let us assume that there are such things in “History” as “historical illnesses” or disorders/diseases;
- Let us imagine, and posit, that these fictional disorders are called “Historiopathies”;
- Now let us ask the question, if such “Historiopathies” actually existed, could it also be possible, in our make-believe, fictional world, for there to be “remedies” for such historiopathic disorders?;
- Let us imagine and posit that such remedies exist, and let’s call the science, or medicine, of treating historiopathies, “Historical Therapy” or “historiotherapeusis”;
- This type of thought experiment was in fact the basis of an actual fictional science of historical therapy that I incorporated into a novel I began writing in the Summer of 2001, called “The History-Project”;
- In the novel, researchers, thinkers, got together to work on a project, called the History-Project, whose goal was to “diagnose” and hopefully “treat” a certain “historical illness” that was affecting the people living in and around the Greater Montreal Region, in Quebec, Canada;
- The project was a complete and total failure, but as a novelist, the author of this novel, it was a “failure-by-design”, i.e. it was designed to fail. So it was never proven altogether if such a science, and medical art of “historiotherapeusis” was indeed possible;
- That is to say, they had to fail so that no one could prove whether it could exist or not, at least as far as the novel was concerned;
- Coming back to reality, Historiomics is itself born from such creative work, and the question remains unanswered, but is mostly meant as a thought experiment: Can nations, peoples, entire societies or civilizations actually suffer from “Historiopathies”?
Historiomics, amongst other things, wants to find out: I. Structuration of Historical Landscapes — Geo-Grammatical Formations & Historical Figures:
- The model used in the novel to study History is a “structural” one;
- That is to say, what we were looking at where the various figures, forms, formations, always at the structural, architectural or architectonic level;
- If History were a Building, then we would be talking about the Foundations, as well as all the structural elements, the beams and shafts and so forth;
- The idea was to try to envision History as made up of so many abstract forms;
- We gave the forms names, we spoke of “Geo-Grammar”, we spoke of various “land masses”;
- We spoke of Motifs, motifs as tectonics, of segments/segmentation, clusters, figural trajectories;
- In a sense, we were developing a kind of graphic notation to help us make statements about History and Historiography;
- Part of the inspiration was Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, as well as some of the work of Walter Benjamin, and some of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, namely their book “What is Philosophy?”;
- We spoke in terms of aggregation, compression, compaction, consolidation, but also dispersal, discontinuities, breaks and gaps in things; we spoke of convergence and divergence, schedules, bases, periodicity, habits, habitats and (in-)habitation; (“habitance”).
II. What In The World Are We Talking About?:
- Think of History as a space, an ambient eco-space;
- Now imagine that through this space, things flow, i.e. energy flows, information flows, particulates flow, it doesn’t matter for now what is flowing through the ambient space;
- Now, imagine that there are certain other things that can form that can IMPEDE the flow of materials and/or energies;
- In Historiomics, the technical term we use for this is the “Historiotome”;
- We say that a “historiotome” has “formed”, that is, a kind of “outgrowth”, almost tumor-like, that is causing an impediment of some sort to the natural flow of energy, information, particulate matter, objects, ideas, etc.;
- You could also see it as a kind of “energetic knot”; or else one can think of it in Reichian terms of a societal (historical) “character armor”;
- The idea here, still fictional — never forget! — is that an entire PEOPLE can have what we might call a “Character Depression”;
- That is, fictionally, and theoretically, a nation or a people, after some traumatic event, say a war or uprising, might feel the effects of the trauma AS A COLLECTIVITY; It is in this sense that we can speak of “historiopathies”, disorders that are historical in origin;
- Let us never forget that this is purely a fictional theory meant to reside inside a completely fictional, or “meta-fictional”, historiographic novel;
- The reason that it occurs inside a novel forms another, higher-order theory of representation and what is called “Physio-Imaging”, in the theory of “Crackland” or “Historiomics”, a.k.a. The History-Project / The Archives-Project (novelistic phenomenologies).
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