e-Reasoning: Between Digital Humanities and e-science

The conception of contemporary science plainly supports the idea of e-science, and the qualitative aspects of both digital humanities and e-science and the search for new methods for extracting information and patterns from texts, hypertexts, images and networks reveals patterns of argumentation, rationality and irrationality that should be taken into consideration as part of the whole enterprise. We call e-reasoning the investigation of the nature of reasoning in the web, based on material in web archives and including the construction of a corpus and cross-archive analyses. Understanding e-reasoning will not only have influence on the debate whether logic (as a guide for reasoning) should be considered prescriptive (or normative) or just descriptive, but also constitute a valuable interface between the digital humanities and e-science. However, a critical account of e-reasoning will also point us toward some limitations and perils involved when trying to substitute theories by mere correlation.