Tables in Leibniz: a challenge for the digital humanities

Abstract

Leibniz's mathematical texts are a perfect example of a type of historical document that is extremely difficult to deal with in the context of an editorial enterprise: the draft. The tables in Leibniz's mathematical manuscripts are a particularly good example of these difficulties, as they are equivocal sources containing many implicit operations. The publication of these texts raises the question of the nature of these signs and the economy of implicit relationships between their various components. Peirce's semiological approach provides the philosophical ground for these reflections, while Michel Serres's structuralism is a fertile source of inspiration. The digital tool holds much promise for many issues, including the particular difficulties of tables. We will show that it can be implemented by different computer structures which largely determine the way the historian conceives them a priori but also the way the reader receives them a posteriori. Finally, the tables are the simple case that founds a general problematic on the interpretation of many manuscripts and allows us to study the problem of the writing process at its root.