[TeMPOraL]

> Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story.

I don't understand this reasoning. Yes, more data = more work, but less data = more likely you're wrong.

[gumby]

Less data: less likelihood someone will challenge you before you get tenure.

The incentives in academia are messed up.

[erikpukinskis]

Is your entire original comment meant to be read as sarcasm then?

Or are you advocating for the idea that history is arbitrary and it’s better to just have a simple story than to have to worry about what really happened?

I’m having a hard time understanding what idea you’re trying to position in this debate.

[gumby]

I was making three points in the three paragraphs:

1 - it's more likely we will be an information-sparse region in the historical record rather than an information-dense region.

2 - professional historians have their own set of incentives which can be counterintuitive to the layperson.

3 - but indeed if there turns out to be a huge amount of stuff (there will likely be mountains of some forms of ephemera) to go through some people may be able to find value using new tools not available in the past to historians.

As someone trained as (but never worked as) a historian I do indeed have a bit of cynicism on point 2. I suspect most if not all actually working in that domain have the same cynicism.