History on Punched Cards: the Use of Computer Science in the Work of Historians at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the 1960s
2022
Abstract
The paper examines the efforts to use computer science in historiography made at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (CSAS) in the 1960s. It includes documents from the fond of the Scientific College of History of the CSAS, which present the contemporary ideas about possible uses of cybernetics in social sciences as well as the administrative and bureaucratic obstacles that stood in the way of implementing these ideas.