Data

This dissertation investigates how historical knowledge is produced in one of the most central digital communities of knowledge, Wikipedia. In 2001, the American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales founded the online encyclopedia, its main concept being that “anyone can edit any page at any time.” This concept allowed Wikipedia to function also as a common and public space for personal reflection. Wikipedia provides this opportunity through the portal of “talk,” as each Wikipedia entry has its own “talk” area. This study explores how historical knowledge is produced on Wikipedia.

Digital history goes, by definition, beyond national frontiers, but can one decipher national specificities in its practices and projects? This chapter explores the birth, development, and institutionalization of digital public history in the United States. Issued from a strong network of digital history practitioners, the success of digital public history in the United States stemmed from its connection with pre-existing public history academic centers and projects.

By providing a facilitated access to data storage, digital technologies seem to make expression and preservation of the self more straightforward. They reconfigure the means and forms of access to data, thus also affecting the relationships and participation of individuals in heritagization and history, and potentially impacting historians. This renews questions that scholars already know well, such as the place of memories in the making of history, and that of self-narratives.

Roundtable and short presentation on Web Archives of Crisis and Conspiracy

Digital Comics - A new way of narrating history The Making Europe Digital Comic Series challenges the way we narrate history. The VUB Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC), specialised in intermedial storytelling, currently hosts Prof. Andreas Fickers, an expert in public history. Together with the Brussels Comics Art Museum, CLIC organised the inaugural lecture of the VUB Lorand Chair Intermediality during the VUB/ULB We.KonektWeek. Fickers works on the Making Europe digital comic series, which is about to radically change the way we narrate history.

What is Cross-Border Cooperation? How to write the History of Cross-Border Cooperation? The contribution explores the historiography in the field and presents two case studies (Euregio Meuse-Rhine and Europäische Vereinigung Eifel-Ardennen). It focusses on the sources that could be used for such a history and on difficulties regarding archival research.

Die Angst unter den Geflüchteten, dass sie an Menschen- oder Organhändler geraten könnten, ist groß. Diese Gerüchte hätten sich schnell verbreitet. Daher sei in den Lagern an der polnisch-ukrainischen Grenze auch Überzeugungsarbeit notwendig. Den Geflüchteten werde erklärt, was sie in Deutschland erwartet. "Da ist so viel Vertrauen gefragt", sagt Inna Ganschow. Die Russin ist mit dem Verein MMS Humanitas an die polnisch-ukrainische Grenze gefahren, um Flüchtlinge nach Deutschland zu bringen.

As famous as the quotation by Lawrence Lessing “Code is law”, the sentence by David Clark at a meeting at the IETF in 1992 “We reject kings, presidents and voting, we believe in rough consensus and running code” became a “motto for Internet standardization” (Russell, 2006) that invites us to have a look at the past relationships and intertwinements between networks design and governance.

Impressions of building a community around people working on the digitization of historical ‘egodocuments’ using Transkribus.

Launched in 2020, the Cohort program is engaging with researchers in a year-long collaboration and mentorship with the Archives Unleashed Project and the Internet Archive, to support web archival research. Web archives provide a rich resource for exploration and discovery! As such, this session will feature the program’s inaugural research teams, who will discuss the innovative ways they are exploring web archival collections to tackle interdisciplinary topics and methodologies. Projects from the Cohort program include:

Les phénomènes viraux et en particulier les gifs et les mèmes ont donné lieu à des études (par H. Jenkins, L. Shifman, R. Milner, D. Kaplan et N. Nova, J. Eppink, A. Wagener et bien d’autres) qui éclairent les phénomènes de circulation, participation, partage (cf. également les recherches de N. John) et transformation au sein des cultures numériques. Les phénomènes viraux sont bien sûr présents dès les débuts du Web et certains voient dans les émoticones ou la loi de Godwin leurs premières occurrences (J. McGrath).