The Collection of uncertainties finds its source in the Belgian digitized heritage collections made public. Thanks to the online catalogues and the progressive digitization of the collections, the search opens up not only to scientific classifications and descriptions but also to the “notes” or “remarks” of the notice. Hence, facilitating cross-referencing and mixing of the keywords from the thesaurus with elements entered more freely. Thus, paradoxically, the more details the scientist or archivist provides - by annotating and thereby introducing nuances - on the origin of an object, the more the fields of the probable, the unsolved and the possible open up to us. Objects sometimes frozen at a date or function can now become objects illustrating doubt, another possible or unclear story. The Collection of uncertainties is composed of all items whose notice contains vocabulary with an uncertain tendency, i.e. words such as “probable”, “probably”, “undoubtedly”, “perhaps”, “almost”, “sometimes”, “uncertain”, etc., in French, Dutch or English. It consists of about ten to a few thousand “articles” depending on the languages or levels of uncertainty chosen, with no identical results for translated or similar words. Depending on the additions or modifications, the Collection of uncertainties is in perpetual evolution, much like knowledge, it evolves according to the uncertain knowledge and recognition of the scientific world.
