Data

»[…] wenn ›die Quelle‹ die Reliquie historischen Arbeitens ist – nicht nur Überbleibsel, sondern auch Objekt wissenschaftlicher Verehrung –, dann wäre analog ›das Archiv‹ die Kirche der Geschichtswissenschaft, in der die heiligen Handlungen des Suchens, Findens, Entdeckens und Erforschens vollzogen werden.« Achim Landwehr wirft in seinem geschichtstheoretischen Essay den Historikern ihren »Quellenglauben« vor – diese Kritik ließe sich im digitalen Zeitalter leicht auf die Heilsversprechen der Apostel der »Big Data Revolution« übertragen.

This special issue addresses practices of border-making and their consequences on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As the reality did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. Articles include new case studies on the creation, centralization or peripheralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains, on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany, and on cross-border activities.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a heterogeneous neurodegenerative disorder with monogenic forms representing prototypes of the underlying molecular pathology and reproducing to variable degrees the sporadic forms of the disease. Using a patient-based in vitro model of PARK7-linked PD, we identified a U1-dependent splicing defect causing a drastic reduction in DJ-1 protein and, consequently, mitochondrial dysfunction. Targeting defective exon skipping with genetically engineered U1-snRNA recovered DJ-1 protein expression in neuronal precursor cells and differentiated neurons.

This book focuses on the history of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), from its origins in the mid-19th century to nowadays. ITU was the fi rst international organization ever and still plays a crucial role in managing global telecommunications today.

The location choice of Stone Age settlements has been long considered to be influenced by environmental conditions. Proximity to water and sandy soils are most typical examples of those conditions. The notion of the influence resulted from the evidence from a relatively small amount of sites. During the recent decades the number of known settlements has increased to a level where statistical assessment of relation between environmental characteristics and settlement location choice is possible.

his volume analyses Belgian garrisons in the Rhineland and Westphalia after the Second World War. They are analysed as contact zones that clearly indicate the political, economic, societal and military consequences of European integration for daily coexistence. The book’s contributions focus on mechanisms and catalysts of entanglement, dissolution and coexistence in local spaces, which did not relocate transnational contacts within Europe to national borderlines, but permanently (re-) configured them in a confined space. How do transnational contacts take place?

In Italian, the adjective giusto (‘right’) has performed the discourse function of response marker since at least 1613 (DELI 2008: 671). In this paper, I argue that the adjective has recently undertaken a new process of discoursivization, defined as the diachronic process that ends in discourse (Ocampo 2006: 317). In particular, I maintain that giusto may also serve the function of invariant tag (Andersen 2001), a linguistic item appended to a statement for the purpose of seeking mutual agreement, verification or corroboration of a claim (Millar and Brown 1979).

Historians are confronted with an overabundance of sources that require new perspectives and tools to make use of large-scale corpora. Based on a use case from the history of psychiatry this paper describes the work of an interdisciplinary team to tackle these challenges by combining different NLP tools with new visual interfaces that foster the exploration of the corpus. The paper highlights several research challenges in the preparation and processing of the corpus and sketches new insights for historical research that were gathered due to the use of the tools.

Inductive models of archaeological site locations have been successfully used for predicting archaeological potential of places in landscapes. These models are mostly based on currently observable environmental information. To reduce environmental determinism and increase both explanatory and predictive power several variables like visibility of locations have been interpreted as social factors of settlement locations.

Science and technology are at the very heart of the European project. But how to write a history of Europe in the making when using technology as an actor category and lens of analysis? This is the driving narrative behind Making Europe: Technology and Transformations (1850-2000) – a sixvolume series on the history of Europe in the «long twentieth century»1. All volumes in the series are co-authored by two or three authors and are the result of an intense debate and discussion amongst all people involved in this collective endeavor.

On May 18, I took part in a very interesting workshop organized by the Malach Centre for Visual History at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague. This exceptional association provides local access to the extensive digital archives of the USC Shoah Foundation - the Institute for Visual history and Education (USC), the Refugee Voices archive of the Association of Jewish Refugees and the testimony collection of the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne.

The importance of smaller financial centres in international capitalism has recently been highlighted by a number of ‘leaks’. Yet such public attention stands in contrast to the paucity of historiographical research on these relatively new centres. To this regard, Luxembourg provides an interesting case study. While identified as a ‘global specialist’ by the Global Financial Centres Index, the genealogy of how it came to achieve this status remains largely under-researched.