The activities of the C²DH’s “Digital History” (DH) unit can be broken down into three overlapping categories: 1) research and development in digital methods; 2) university teaching for the Bachelor’s in European Cultures and the Master’s in European History, as well as in-house skills training; 3) outreach – disseminating research through public events and websites.
Supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the French National Research Agency (ANR), BLIZAAR develops new hybrid visualisation techniques for multimodal dynamic graphs. The C²DH is particularly involved in applying this approach to digital cultural heritage. BLIZAAR facilitates analysis of the complex mechanisms governing relations between events and entities.
In 2018, work also continued on impresso, a project launched in 2017 to develop new methods for analysing historical newspapers based on a digitised corpus of newspapers and periodicals covering nearly 200 years. impresso is a joint project run by the C²DH, the DHLAB at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich. “We are currently working on the first version of the user interface, which should be completed during 2019,” says Marten Düring, project coordinator for the C²DH.
As part of the impresso project, Estelle Bunout is in charge of a related research project on debates about the question of Europe in Luxembourg and Switzerland in the early 20th century. She is using the digital tool to compile a corpus of relevant articles with a view to applying text mining techniques that will enable her to identify related discourses on Europe.
When analysing online documents, a viewer that displays an XML-TEI text on one side and a facsimile of the original on the other can be a useful tool. This dual visualisation is possible with the “Transviewer” interface developed by Florentina Armaselu. The analytical potential of the tool was tested during a Master’s module.
The same C²DH researcher has also developed a digital application for performing text analysis on corpora of oral history interviews. The application was tested by students on the Master’s in Contemporary European History programme at the University of Luxembourg using a selection of interviews about the European integration process.
Historical writings and accounts cover topics at varying scales, from individual words and specific terms to an increasing level of generality. Exploring this variability, an innovative research project led by Florentina Armaselu will analyse historiographical documents and writings by combining a microperspective with a broader perspective.
Digital history requires a multidisciplinary approach in which specialists work closely together rather than remaining enclosed in separate ivory towers. How does this collaboration between humanities and computer science work in practice? And does this new approach to academic subjects influence historians’ thought processes and means of expression? Max Kemman will attempt to shed some light on these broad questions in his PhD thesis. “The answers vary significantly since collaboration is always negotiated at local level between the individual stakeholders – the research institutions and their partners,” he explains.
Members of the DH unit contribute to several modules of the Bachelor’s in European Cultures and the Master’s in Contemporary European History, using and promoting digital approaches and methods in their teaching. Gerben Zaagsma taught a module on “Digital approaches in modern Jewish history” in which the students learned how to critically apply digital resources to this field.
During a seminar on the occupation during the Second World War, organised by the University of Luxembourg, Trier University and Saarland University, Master’s students were asked to develop digital narrative methods to present their research. The C²DH will also be running a digital humanities course for Bachelor’s students at the University of Luxembourg, starting at the beginning of the next academic year.
The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke is generally considered to be one of the pioneers of source criticism as the basis for historiographical research. He lends his name to “Ranke.2”, a platform for teaching about digital source criticism that explores the additional skills needed to analyse digital sources. Developed by Stefania Scagliola for the C²DH, this online platform was officially launched in October 2018. It has several levels geared towards different audiences and their specific interests: users can whet their appetite with a brief introduction to the subject via a short animation or podcast before getting stuck into the lessons themselves, with more advanced exercises and a workshop for group work. The Ranke.2 website (https://ranke2.uni.lu), while specifically aimed at university lecturers, is available to anyone with an interest in the subject. It was officially launched in October 2018 at an international conference for digital hermeneutics in history organised by Gerben Zaagsma.
Given that historical research draws increasingly on digital networks, the C²DH has decided to fill an information gap on this topic: in 2018, the second issue of the online Journal of Historical Network Research (https://jhnr.uni.lu) was published. A wiki on digital history is also currently being developed.
In 2018, the C²DH received a grant from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe to prepare and direct the development of a web portal on Jewish studies using digital humanities methods, a project that also involves partners from other European countries, Israel and the United States.
Finally, in the DH unit, Juliane Tatarinov is in charge of relations with other C²DH units. She coordinates and lends her support to the development of research projects with a view to applying for funding, contributes to the digital collections on the Second World War and industrial heritage, and helps organise outreach events such as editions of the Forum Z series.
The C²DH’s “Contemporary History of Luxembourg” research unit has set itself the objective of studying questions with varying temporal, spatial and theoretical contexts, with the aim of producing new scientific knowledge about the phenomena and processes that have had a major impact on Luxembourg and whose comparative value goes beyond the national perspective: the history of the formation of the nation state, the history of the two world wars, periods of occupation and their legacy, antisemitism and the Holocaust, collaboration and resistance, attempts at authoritarianism, democratisation, the history of trade unions and the welfare state, the history of migration, and the history of societal and cultural transformations since the 1970s.
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The C²DH Public History Department has begun working on the compilation of an image database on Luxembourg’s industrial heritage.
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The world of finance, a “glocal” history field
The financialisation of the world economy during the 20th century is a relatively new topic in the discipline of historical research.
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Luxembourg, a land of migration
Luxembourg is and always has been a country characterised by migration, with waves of emigration in the 19th century and immigration since the early 20th century.
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A framework for young researchers
One of the original features of the C²DH, like the University of Luxembourg as a whole, is the international dimension of its research and the multicultural approach to academic study.
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