Thinkering

European research grant awarded for research into Europe's Audiovisual Heritage Online, coordinated by prof. dr. E. Müller, Utrecht University

The European Culture Forum 2017 took place in Milan from 7 to 8 December. It was also the official kick-off event of the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018. In the following blogpost, I would like to summarize and discuss the debates related to culture and cultural heritage that took place during the event and add some personal reflections.

Le C²DH, en collaboration avec la Radio 100,7, produit une série de podcasts consacrée à la vie et à l’œuvre politique de Pierre Werner.

Debates on the role of museums and their place in society are not new. Though museums have become more visitor-oriented over the past decades, a lot of potential remains unused. In this blogpost, I would like to discuss how museums can be places of "shared authority" and public debate.

Ad Pollé (Europeana) and Frank Drauschke (Facts & Files) will give an overview of the Europeana 14-18 and Transcribathon projects and their potential for research and education.

2018 will be the European Year of Cultural Heritage, as proclaimed by the European Union. The kick-off event for Luxembourg took place on 29 September.

Can video games be a serious research topic or are they only entertainment products? At the Gamescom Congress in Cologne, a series of talks and panel discussions were dedicated to video games from many different perspectives. In this blogpost, I will discuss some of them illustrating that video games can and should be taken seriously.

The fourth DHBenelux Conference was hosted by Utrecht University (the Netherlands) from 3 to 5 July 2017. Dr Florentina Armaselu presented a paper co-authored with Dr Elena Danescu, entitled "The Quest for Questions in Digital History: A Comparative View on Werner- and Delors Report on Economic and Monetary Union".

Within the framework of the research project "Failure and Success of Dummy Head Stereo: An innovation history of 3D listening", Stefan Krebs and Andreas Fickers produced a binaural radio play about the history of binaural stereo.

Le C²DH cherche des volontaires pour aider à mesurer l’impact des outils numériques sur l’innovation et la découverte en histoire.

Digital history provides new opportunities, but the use of digital tools should not blind historians to the existing challenges. An uncritical belief in the power of digital tools would be wrong, as much as an outright dismissive stance.

The aim of the project “Media monitoring of the past. Mining 200 years of historical newspapers” is to link digitised corpora of newspapers from Switzerland, Luxembourg, France and Germany and to develop new methods to analyse them.

During this conference digital history will be addressed through a triple spectrum: academic research, public history, and pedagogy, in order to trace continuities and transformations in history as a discipline; and contribute to explore the broader digital humanities field through this case study.

In the 2017 edition of the conference, arts and humanities students and early career researchers, regardless of their technical background, were invited to share their ideas and experiences in their creative and scientific encounters with visualisation as it is deployed in and for research across disciplines.

The challenge of this workshop on 'transcription and technology’, which took place from 10 to 12 May in Arezzo, consisted in turning recorded human speech into a textual representation that is as close as possible to what has been uttered.

In the course of the twentieth century, various generations have documented and materialized their family memories on film, video and digital media. But how have these changes in technologies of memory shaped new forms of recording and screening as family memory practices?

From 20th to 24th February, a winter school on “Skills in digital humanities” was organised at the University of Luxembourg, where the participants were introduced to the software Nodegoat and the development of databases. It was a possibility of tinkering with a digital tool that was completely new to me. In the following, I will give a personal account of my own experiences with Nodegoat, and present a critical reflection on the problems I encountered and the use of digital tools.

In this article, I will develop a first outline of my dissertation project on the history of cultural policy in Luxembourg, which would include a case study of a cultural institution.

During the workshop on digital source criticism that was held at the Humboldt University in Berlin on 23 June 2016, interesting reflections on the “digital turn” aroused.