Data

This thesis introduces a comprehensive narrative of the history of Luxembourg’s investment funds, tracing their evolution from the incorporation of closed-end funds as holding companies in the 1930s to the enactment of two harmonization fund laws in the 1980s. Through a focus on the actors "behind the industry", the thesis identifies three enduring patterns. First, policymakers consistently employed "bifurcation of sovereignty" practices to stimulate the local fund market during systemic economic crises (notably, during the interwar years and the steel crisis of the late 1970s).

This paper is related to my current book project which explores the history and genealogies of digital history, set within the broader context of the ways in which technology has shaped historical research practices and knowledge production since the late 19th century. My paper focuses on a key aspect, the circulation of technological knowledge and expertise among transnational networks of historians, archivists, and librarians, the ways in which these networks were constituted and their transformative influence on historical knowledge production.

Au regard du nombre actuel de lits psychiatriques toujours élevé dans le royaume, il est aisé de penser que la désinstitutionnalisation psychiatrique en Belgique n’a pas eu lieu. Cependant, un analyse plus fine permet de révéler un réalité d’avantage nuancée. En effet, la transformation de l’asile en hôpital psychiatrique dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle entraine la sortie de certaines catégories de patients traditionnellement placées dans les institutions psychiatriques à défaut d’autres perspectives de prise en charge.

Kennzeichnend für die «langen» 1960er Jahre in Westeuropa ist aus konsumhistorischer Sicht die enorme Dynamik der Entwicklung des Massenkonsums. Der Verkäufermarkt der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit wurde ab Ende der 1950er Jahre durch eine verschärfte Konkurrenzsituation abgelöst, im Zuge derer Konsumgüterproduzenten statt der Produktion den Verbraucher und seine Wünsche ins Zentrum ihrer Überlegungen zu rücken suchten. Das führte zu einer zunehmenden Verbreitung des Marketingkonzepts, auch unter Produzenten elektrotechnischer Konsumgüter wie Braun oder Telefunken.

The starting points of the presentation consist of some examples of answers, in text and image, generated by chatbots such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, to questions such as: Could you give us a short history of artificial intelligence, from the beginning to the present? Could you generate an image to represent the history of artificial intelligence?

Historische Medien spiegeln die Werte- und Wissenshorizonte vergangener Zeiten wider. Für ihre Erforschung werden auch zunehmend Methoden des maschinellen Lernens genutzt. In den letzten Jahren sind neben Volltextsuchen weitere Methoden hinzugekommen: Topic modeling, Bildähnlichkeitsanalysen, Text Reuse Detection, Spracherkennung, oder Word Embeddings eröffnen jeweils neue Zugänge zu großen Textsammlungen.

In the impresso project, a team of computational linguists, historians and designers strive to enable data-driven analyses of historical media across time, institutional silos, media types and languages. To this end we compile a corpus of historical newspaper and radio collections with the help of Western European partners, enrich it using text mining techniques and develop user interfaces for their exploration and computational analysis.

Many network analysis projects rely on somewhat ready-made sources for data; for example, email logs, questionnaires, church registers, letter exchanges and trade relations make it relatively easy to identify who is connected to whom and how. It is, however, considerably more difficult to extract quantifiable data from text. Some issues to consider here are: how can we bridge the gap between the depth of hermeneutics and data analysis? How can we systematize text interpretation?

Le 8 mai dernier, Emmanuel Macron se tenait seul au bout d’une avenue vidée, de peur d’une possible casserolade. Cette image marquante nous rappelle à considérer les commémorations comme des enjeux politiques de premier ordre, renvoyant toujours à un état des relations entre État, pouvoir et citoyens, y compris dans ce que ce lien peut avoir de plus conflictuel. Il en ira des mêmes enjeux pour la commémoration, ce 11 novembre, des 105 ans de l’armistice de 1918.

This presentation aimed at reflecting on the history of vernacular digital cultures and their historical approach through web archives. It relied on the experience of the Hivi project (A history of Online Virality) and notably the historical study of memes we conducted. This led to envisioning some desirable futures in approaching vernacular digital cultures (issues of access, inclusiveness, role of visual and sound studies, readability of web archives ,etc.)

This lightening talk is part of the panel "Teaching history of technology: experiments, innovative methods, and approaches". It aims to discuss the experiment Prof. Schafer conducted over 14 weeks with her master students in creating a Living Book intertwining sources and research articles on the topic “Women, Gender and ICTs”.