Phd Theses

Creating the Urban Citizen in Hamburg and Marseille: A Trans-Urban History of Public Urban Green Spaces during the Postwar Period (1945-1973)
Public urban green spaces are mirrors of societal relations: they reflect the relationship between government officials and urban citizens, labor and recreation, private and public life. Set in the aftermath of WWII and continuing until the First Oil Shock in 1973, this study captures a time of urban restructuring and rebuilding in Western Europe. The focus lies specifically on public parks and playgrounds around the port areas of Hamburg and Marseille, thus combining the concepts of the green and the blue city.

The transition from planned to market economy and the subsequent economic, political and social changes in the wake of the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc during and following the years of 1989/91 have recently become a prominent branch of historiography under the notion of “transformation”. Western European countries, such as Luxembourg had its own changes in socio- economic and political order, following the 1973 oil crisis. Known in German literature as “structural shift”, this period, which extends until the 2000s, was marked by economic crises, deindustrialisation and market collapses as well as the disappearance of the traditional industrial worker. These two phenomena have until now been treated mostly independently in historiography.
This project researches the history of the steel company ARBED and its steelworks in Luxembourg as well as one of its subsidiary companies the “Thüringer Stahlwerke” in Unterwellenborn in former East Germany, acquired in 1992, as two case studies to analyse both these phenomena within one single, transnational and comparative concept of transformation between the years of 1973 and 2001. Companies offer a particularly well-suited framework for analysing transformation because of their functions as both pacemakers and objects of socio-economic change and as social spaces for workers, their families, and the community around them. The hypothesis is verified, that by means of a diachronic comparison of these two different case studies, it is possible to observe similar mechanisms and dynamics of transformation beyond time periods and geographical spaces. Since the history of a company consists of more than just its economic figures, an approach that combines business and labour history is used. On one hand, by comparing written documents such as archival material, annual reports from the company and media sources, changes within corporate structures and management strategies are analysed. On the other hand, Oral History interviews are used for an analysis of changes within experiences and everyday working and living practices of workers. Furthermore, the project reveals potential transnational ties and exchanges of experience within corporate and personnel coordination between the two case studies.
By comparing similarities and differences and unraveling ties of the changes of these two Western European and Eastern European branches of ARBED, a new transnational understanding of transformation of both business and labour history is provided. The research results and the generated data such as fragments of media and archival sources and of Oral History are also presented within a multimedia online exhibition using digital tools to comparatively visualize the transformation of ARBED in Luxembourg and in Unterwellenborn.

The period between the occupation of Luxembourg by Nazi Germany on May 10, 1940 and the beginning of the deportation trains to the East on October 16, 1941, marked by the constantly tightening net of Nazi persecution, was characterized by a wave of flight movements of Jewish people. While on the days following the occupation around 1500 Jewish people left the country mainly for France, during a general movement of population flight, around 1700 other Jews managed or were forced to quit Luxembourg by the time the Eastern deportations began, and an escape became nearly impossible. The reasons for this specificity are manifold and are based on the interaction of various initiatives and actors: individual efforts, collective transports of the Jewish consistory, expulsion by the Nazi authorities, ... . While many of these refugees initially found shelter in France only to fall into the hands of the Nazis and be deported from there, a minority was able to emigrate via neutral countries such as Spain or Portugal to safe havens such as the USA. These particular developments therefore lead to the following research question: How and where to could Jewish persecutees escape the Holocaust out of Luxembourg and what supportive networks existed? The question focuses thus on two mutually influencing aspects: the flight itself and the potential help behind it. In addition to the analysis of the individual actors and possible networks with various motivations, the focus is on the geographical areas of flight (mainly Luxembourg, France, Portugal, USA), which enables a multinational perspective. Furthermore, individual fates and trajectories of families will particularly be woven into the discussion in order to offer a micro-historical approach.

Extending its mining valleys and industrial compounds over France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, the contemporary history of the Minett region has been marked by the relentless transnational flow of goods, ideas, and people. Irene’s research explores transnational movements from a microscopic angle, by examining the dynamics taking place around and across national frontiers. She focuses specifically on underground cross-border actors circulating the Minett in the interwar years. To facilitate transnational movements between France and Luxembourg, large industrial groups have effectively altered borders by assiduous demands and negotiations with national governments. The concessions given to steel barons have also contributed to a large array of undeclared cross-border mobilities, such as petty smuggling. Understood as a form of transgression integrated in daily life, small-scale contraband did not hesitate to make use of the Minett's geographic layout and the pathways built by iron and steel makers. Besides, certain migrant workers became actively involved in communist circles in the 1920s and 1930s, creating subversive networks across bordering localities. In the face of severe immigration police officers, they were forced to operate underground for propaganda and organization processes. In its different shapes, cross-border clandestinity pushed the limits established by border regimes, challenging the legitimacy of borderland authorities and laying bare the pitfalls of national sovereignty in the margins. Alteration, transgression, and subversion often took place amid seemingly banal, everyday experiences of borderland inhabitants and entities. Inspired by recent anthropological and microhistorical trends, the doctoral researcher tackles how “the underground” came about in ordinary life and how it was facilitated by living conditions and working settings in the Minett's metallurgic area.

The thesis identifies the diversity of coping strategies of Luxembourgish male and female forced recruits born in the years 1920-1927 in the German armed forces (Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS) and in the German labour services Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) and Kriegshilfsdienst (KHD) based on their biographies. The responses and scopes of action of the forced recruits affected by German recruitment policies will be analysed. The research will focus in the first part on statistics comparing the extent of the recruitment in the rural municipality of Weiswampach in the very North of Luxembourg to the industrialised town of Schifflange in the very South of Luxembourg. In the second part, the coping strategies and the experiences of male and female forced recruits from the municipality of Bettembourg will be analysed through their letters written to the local shopkeeper, Valerie Steichen, and her family – a collection of almost 600 letters from 61 correspondence partners.

In the context of the project Repairing Technology - Fixing Society: History of Maintenance and Repair in Luxembourg, 1918-1990, financed by the Luxembourg Research Fund (FNR), my dissertation will deal with the hidden, fragile and dysfunctional parts of (modern) communication infrastructures. A historical contextualization will locate the terms in the short 20th century. A Broken Word Thinking -approach as described by Steven Jackson for example, opens up a completely new way of thinking, also in the discipline of the history of science and technology, where we can develop new narratives through this approach. The point here is to set not the functioning but the failure of technical systems as the starting point for historical research. Technological perfection is thus exposed as an economic and linguistic construct that basically has more to do with the marketing aura of the object than with the object itself and its use, maintenance and repair.
The historical starting point for this project is geographically Luxembourg and, in terms of sources, the archive of the PTT Luxembourg and the Siemens archive in Berlin. On that basis I will explore how technological infrastructures in particular are able to promote and form collective identities and how repair and maintenance practices create new institutional realities in recourse to the technological object itself.

This research aims to investigate how Luxembourg adapted, appropriated, and adopted the Internet and the web from the early 1990s to the present day. The research goes back to the 1970s to dig into the "histories of networking," analyze the impact of the multiple computer networks emerging within the European context, and understand the specificities of the different paths of Internet adaptation, appropriation, and adoption within the country.

The first part focuses on the analysis of the adaptation of the infrastructure in Luxembourg, starting in the 1970s with its first steps in computerization and networking, passing through the launch of Restena (Réseau Téléinformatique de l’Éducation Nationale et de la Recherche) in 1989 and the first connection to the Internet in 1992. We will analyze the first ISPs, the leading players, and how the infrastructure evolved towards the actual situation. A second part explores the evolution of the appropriation of the web and social networks from the professionals of the web point of view by relying on selected case studies. In the last part, we will investigate domestication and reception at large. How did the users adopt the Internet and the web, and how did they contribute and shape them?

This research project focuses on the progress and consequences of the abolition of trade corporations in the “Belgian” departments, during their attachment to France from 1795 to 1814. Carried out in a well-defined  chronological and geographical framework, this innovative research project aims to examine the economic, social and psychological impact of the abolition of corporations as well as its modalities. While this is indeed a study of economic history, primarily urban, its originality lies above all in taking into account the individual level by studying the socioeconomic trajectories of former members of suppressed corporations. Individual strategies and perceptions of strengths, weaknesses, threats or opportunities, and even expressions of feelings such as worry, hope, joy or anger in the face of a new economic situation, are elements likely to partly explain the craftmen’s decision-making during a key moment in the economic history of the future Belgium.
Our objective is to try to both fill a historiographical hollow at the level of Belgian departments and to get the study of trade corporations out of the sole and dry financial and economic logic. To this end, we will rely, by mixing micro and macro-analytical approaches, on a diverse range of sources. Whether we like it or not, there are always feelings and emotions behind men: if history wants to study man in the past, it must then also take into account his daily feelings. The latter are often called upon only to understand the great revolutions: what about less important events especially when we know, from the recent work of specialists in behavioral economics, in particular those of Richard Thaler, that emotions play a significant role in our decision-making?

The topic of this research is “Historical Data Visualization” in the context of interdisciplinary projects. The research questions focus on understanding what the different disciplines need in terms of data visualization, for what purposes and what are the tools and programming languages currently available, and their limitations. 
Data visualization is very often viewed as an equivalent of statistical representation of data in all its forms. This representation serves effectively certain objectives such as abstraction, reduction, standardization, or legibility, of interest to some disciplines and use cases, namely business, engineering, and science. Numerous tools and programming languages allow to visualize data according to these principles. Other disciplines and areas of knowledge, such as history, literature, art, journalism, or education, are confronted with the need to use the same tools ignoring some fundamental principles of their own disciplines, to program from scratch new visual vocabularies and functionalities, or to use design tools that are disconnected from the data. 
As part of the research, the needs of the different disciplines and areas of knowledge are analyzed, based on their own definitions of data and data visualization, the relation between the two of them, and the expected user interaction. The meeting points between disciplines are sought and the transformation of visualizations between approaches is experimented with. All of this with the purpose of using data visualization to facilitate interdisciplinary projects, but also to open new approaches to data visualization within the disciplines themselves.
The answers to all these questions will serve to define the requirements for the development of the tools to fill some of the gaps in the existing tools.

This research is developed at the C2DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History), within the context of the LuxTime Audacity Project, an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with the LCSB (Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine) in the field of environmental cheminformatics, and the LIST (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) in the field of eco-hydrology. 

The Luxtime will be using a local case, the industrialization of Belval and the Minette region, as a testbed for methodological and epistemological reflections on how to study historical exposomics, the impact of environmental exposures on the health of the local populations in a long-term perspective. In combining past evidence from hydrological systems, hydrological studies (containing information about water pollution, climate change, and topographic and geological transformations), medical records (describing desease patterns, mortality rates, social and psychological well-being), and history (archival sources documenting economic, social, political, and cultural changes), a new approach to studying the past is possible. The case study tests the analytical potential of a multi-layered research design.

This research project is a ‘spin-off’ of a large European initiative called the ‘European Time Machine’ that aims at creating a collective digital information system mapping European economic, social, cultural, and geographical evolution over time, using technology.

This research builds upon previous research in the fields of visual display and semiotic concepts, human-computer interaction and humanistic approaches to display and interfaces.

My research revolves around the investment fund industry in Luxembourg, between 1929 and 1989. The analysis is based on original quantitative sources – such as the Luxembourg Fund Data Repository of the University of Luxembourg, and the recently made available data on funds from CSSF archives – and qualitative sources – such as parliamentary acts and first-hand interviews. The innovative purpose of the research lies in individuating and describing the main determinants behind the extraordinary expansion of the fund industry in the second half of 1900 and, ultimately, evaluating the presence of external catalysts.

In January 2020 Blandine Landau started a PhD. focusing on the spoliation of Jewish property during World War II in Luxembourg. Cofinanced by the Fondation Luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the University of Luxembourg, it is set as a joint direction between Prof. Fickers (Center for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg) and Prof. Backouche (Centre des Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France), with the support of Prof. Ass. Scuto (Center for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg) and Prof. Gensburger (Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France). 
Using the methods of microhistory and quantitative analysis put forward in recent research , Blandine Landau will focus on study-cases to understand the mechanisms of the dispossession of people considered as Jews in Luxembourg between 1940 and 1945. Starting with an in-depth economical and sociological research on specific neighborhoods of Esch-sur-Alzette (Brill) and Luxembourg-city (Merl), she will then show how the people living and working in these areas are dispossessed of what the owned and what they were in a process designed to annihilate them socially, and then physically. The third part of her research will focus on the matter of luxury goods, especially art pieces, following specific items before, during and after World War II. 
The goal of this analysis is to study the effects of dispossession at a micro-level, revealing actions, tendencies, mechanisms, actors, impacts that did not appear in macro-studies such as the one led by the Special Commission for the study of the spoliation of Jewish property in Luxembourg during the years of war 1940-1945 . The micro-scale will allow for a case-by-case approach, following the people and the objects to give a renewed perspective on the mechanisms of the dispossession of Jews during World War II, and try to determine the specificities of Luxembourg in a broader context. 

This PhD. is part of a broader project, giving way to international conferences (study-days “Dispossess – Dispossessed”, July 5-6 2021, University of Luxembourg and National Center for Literature, Mersch; Forum Z “What is Remembered Lives – Memory of the Holocaust in the Digital Age, October 18, 2021). It is also linked to the Digital Memorial of the Holocaust in Luxembourg.

The development of modern Luxembourg owes much to the growth of a vast industrial urban complex in its southern region. By the beginning of the 20th century, the success of the mining and steel industries in Esch-sur-Alzette was accompanied by an explosion in its population, namely through the arrival of foreigner workforce. Conditions were set for a modern urban planning as well as private property development of the city to take place. The transition of a traditional village setting to that of an industrial city merits therefore attention. In the context of the urbanisation process, the role forged by migration is implicit. Working class, civil servants and private sector employees together, played a prominent role in the migration dynamics in Esch-sur-Alzette. Whether it is cross-border or long-distance, migration overarches multiple aspects of Esch-sur-Alzette’s history and urban development. The same can be said of the role played by Esch-sur-Alzette’s bourgeoisie.
What influences did urban development exert on processes of social mobility? Which mutations affecting socio-professional and family categories, demographic trends and mentalities can be traced back to the period between 1900- 1939? 
Although prolific, the historiography of Esch-sur-Alzette has often overlooked aspects concerning its middle and upper classes, legitimately having privileged a narrative starring its working class. Also less charted for, is how the social fabric of the city was affected by the co-habitation of different cultural, religious and economic backgrounds and in which ways the professional expertise of some migrants determined the dynamics of their integration in Luxembourgish society. 
This research will thus be looking at the Esch-sur-Alzette’s urban development dimension arising from the intersection of migratory and class creation processes by way of the contribution they may have had in the embellishment and modernization of the city.

The doctoral thesis “Lebensläufe von Patient*innen – Heterogenität der Institutionen” studies the question of the erosion of the frontier between normality and madness in Belgium in the second half of the twentieth century through the reconstitution over long periods of time of the life paths of people interned at the Institute of Psychiatry of the Brugmann Hospital in Brussels. Through a writing of history from “below”, this project meets a triple objective: first, to record the heterogeneity of life histories, then to highlight the multiple places of care that emerge from the 1960s onwards and finally to make audible the experiences of the actors of this deinstitutionalization (patients, nurses, psychologists...), who have hardly been heard until now. The Institute's medical and administrative records are the primary archival material. However, these sources will be completed by archives of other institutions frequented by these patients (for example: social centers, establishments for the handicapped or the elderly, prisons, etc.) in order to reconstitute the prehistory and the posthistory of their psychiatric internment. The thesis "Lebensläufe von Patient*innen – Heterogenität der Institutionen " is part of a multidisciplinary research programm supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the Deutsch Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the hospitals Uniklinikum in Düsseldorf and Charité in Berlin.

For a long time, financial history has made little room for, or even overshadowed, the built environment without which the financial fluid cannot move. In other words, the piping system through which financial products pass in transit. Drawing on a broad interdisciplinary economical, historical and geographical literature, archival investigations, first-hand interviews completed by GIS analysis, the purpose of this research is to describe and understand how the financial sector shaped Luxembourg city postwar urban development.

My dissertation asks how parliamentary debate has become increasingly technocratic in the twentieth century. Using text mining methods, I try to computationally study "technocratic reasoning" in debates. This will show to what extent worries about technocratization are valid, and if so, how technocratic modes of reasoning in parliament affects our modern-day democracy.

History is characterized by an immense variety of experiences and perspectives, which can often result in being conflicting or competing. This polyvocality and multitude of interpretations coexists in historical narratives, even if not all of them are equally and justly represented in historiography. Through Public History and public participation practices applied in museums, the matter of diverse historical narratives and their representations and possible inclusion in historiography and in cultural and historical institutions raises, together with multiple versions of the past. This plurality can lead to significant impacts on both, historical narrations and institutions. 
Within this framework, the research examines how the multiple and often competing public interpretations of the past can be treated, by whom, and how they can be embedded in the official historiography and in history production, with a special scope on museums.
Hence, the main research question targets how history museums can interact with the results of participatory practices, shared authority and public participation and how an appropriate stage for these multiple and often competing interpretations of the past can be provided by the institutions. Additionally, the role of the historian also needs to be reconsidered to promote a more inclusive and progressive approach and to provide a safe environment for exchange inside institutions. The historian becomes a public history facilitator, who helps structuring interpretative frameworks to collectively study, interpret and understand the past, by proposing more compound and engaging historical tasks to public participants and by involving the voices of everyone in the historical narrative portrayed in institutions.
Three museums, namely the M9 in Venice, IT, the House of European History in Brussels, BE, and the Luxembourg City Museum in Luxembourg City, LU, figure as partners and case studies to apply the methods and models elaborated during the research, measure their impacts as well as the reverberations and ramifications of the application of the discipline of Public History inside historical museums.

The emergence of the iron and steel industry shaped the face of the then small rural town by adding new neighborhoods as well as changing the size and composition and of its population. Far from being a homogenous mass, the social, economic and cultural lives of the men, woman and children of Esch-sur-Alzette shaped — and were shaped by — their urban environment. Using a micro-historical approach, sociohistorical research, analyzation of existing and in cooperation with the inhabitants of Esch-sur-Alzette through oral history interviews and their private collections as well as exploiting the obvious and the hidden information and clues from partly digitized documents like population censuses, professional and industrial censuses, archives of the bureau de la population from Esch-sur-Alzette, archives of the Biens communaux office and local associations, alien policy files, photos, maps and historical newspapers, this study aims at reconstructing the evolution of six streets of Esch-sur-Alzette which are assumed to be representative of different social groups of an industrialized town in Europe from the 19th to the 21th century.
The research on some of the buildings and the past and current inhabitants of the rue Jean- Pierre Bausch and the rue des Mines as well as the rue Brill will shed light on the demographical changes as well as the informal rules, values and social networks, formed identities, ways of life, leisure time and crisis management of the steel workers and their families underlying the major social and political changes over the course of the century. How did they view themselves; how did they imagine life in other parts of the town and how were contacts between them established?
The research on the rue Emile Mayrisch will offer a similar glance into the world of the industrial bourgeoisie and their successors. The rue de Luxembourg will be representative of a more socially mixed society. Finally, the evolution of the rue de l’Alzette from a riverbed into the main commercial street with some of the most prestigious buildings of Esch-sur- Alzette will showcase the transformation of the town center in accordance with the growth and decline of an industrial town. The findings will be compared to other European regions of industrialization like Ruhr, Lorraine, Nord Pas de Calais, Borinage and Liverpool.
The study is inspired by the pioneering studies of John Foot on a micro-history of one apartment block in the inner-suburb of Bovisa, Milan, over a period of 100 years by trying to reconstruct a detailed history of at least two houses per street. Moreover, the study continues previous research work done by Denis Scuto on the history of the “Casa dei Romagnoli” in immigrant workers district Hoehl in Esch-sur-Alzette. The project will also represent the first step to a web-accessible interactive historical map of Esch-sur-Alzette.

During the Second World War the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was de facto annexed and incorporated into the German Reich. More than 10.000 young men and women, who were born between 1920-1927, were drafted into the Wehrmacht, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) and the Kriegshilfsdienst (KHD). This doctoral thesis will focus on the social milieus of the soldiers and recruits. More precisely how and to what extent the deployment of the recruits in the German forces influenced the lives of their family members who stayed at home. What socio-economic and psychological hardships did they have to endure following the enrolments? What were their survival strategies? Which experiences of support and repression can be identified? Some families of deserters were resettled and their property confiscated. Other families knocked on the door of national organizations or the local administrations to receive financial and material aid following the loss of income. The research adopts a bottom-up perspective based on a biographical approach. It is based on the analysis of official documents and personal records from a handful families in order to reveal some key experiences on a micro level throughout the war. The gathered experiences will allow a comparison between the different regions in Luxembourg in order to establish an inner-Luxembourgish comparison and to demonstrate the multitude of war experiences in the country.

Johanna Jaschik is currently investigating the potential and limits of citizen science for the discipline of border studies on the basis of the project “Talking Borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange”, a citizen science experiment that was conducted at the Second World Conference of the Association of Borderlands Studies in Vienna and Budapest in 2018 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. This research will set the methodological basis for a new Citizen Science project in the context of transformation historiography and border research in the post-Soviet space.

Within the CORE project “Repairing technology – fixing society? History of maintenance and repair in Luxembourg (1918 – 1990)” this study aims to uncover the diachronic, non-linear changes of repair opportunities in Luxembourg in the short 20th century. Aside from drawing inspiration from interdisciplinary research on repair practices to further challenge some standard narratives in the history of technology (like the fetishism of innovation) this study will collect a wide range of historical data through archival research, statistics and oral history to portray a holistic account of the repair of everyday objects. While there has been some research done that focused on repair practices within larger companies and factories, this study is a first in systematically uncovering these from a bottom-up and hands-on thinkering perspective.
At its heart the study thus aims to go beyond simplistic arguments for the decline of repair opportunities of everyday objects like stating that we are now living in a society of mass production and consumption and are therefore doomed to follow the eternal cycle of buy – use – throw away – buy anew. I will therefore show how repair practices and opportunities have not vanished per se, but how they shifted – in form, scope and appreciation.

Arguments may occur in various contexts from debate forums on the Web to discussions among the jury members in the Court. The automatic process of extracting arguments from natural language text is known as Argumentation Mining.
Political debates are one of the application scenarios of major interest for this research area. In these debates, arguments are constructed to justify the plans the candidates’ parties advocate or the stance they take towards certain topics such as abortion, tax cuts, immigration.
In the election debates, the candidates attempt to make their claims appealing, while discrediting the opponent by attacking the strength of his/her claims. Thus, the increasingly available data of online political forums, transcripts of televised discussions or parliamentary debates provide researchers with a huge amount of textual data, from which fallacies, persuasive arguments, incoherence among the arguments proposed by a candidate, can be automatically identified.
This study focuses on extracting arguments from transcripts of presidential debates organized by the Commission on presidential debates in the United States from 1960 to 2016.
An annotated dataset is going to be used as an input to the AM pipeline to automatically extract the claims made in the arguments and the premises on which the claims are reasoned upon. We also plan to address the further AM task of predicting the attack or support relations between different arguments.
The aim of this study is to help researches in the field of social sciences, public address, rhetoric and history to analyze the large amount of discussions that is now available mostly by means of digitization of textual resources. Applications ranges from studying the impact of persuasive arguments, tracking the coherency of candidates’ claims in debates, detecting fallacies in arguments, exploiting the audience’s sentiments to construct the arguments, and altering the reasoning methods through time.

For my project, I will work in the intersection between architectural history, heritage conservation, museum education and digital design. I will explore how digital technologies can be used to create or enhance visitor experiences to heritage sites and promote understanding of their history. My particular focus will be on developing reconstructions that show degrees of certainty in their accuracy, and integrating data sources and metadata to demonstrate the thought process that went into their creation. I will use Vianden and Larochette castles as case studies, contrasting an existing commercial reconstruction with a new one developed along these principles.

This research will focus on the evolution of the design and use of computer devices from the 1940s to the 1980s and its relation to occupational segregation based on gender and other social categories. Furthermore, the research studies the influence of these designs on working conditions based on five case studies of different computer designs. In a final stage the influence of the media representation of the technology and its users on gender stereotypes takes centre stage.

In order to recreate the design and use of computer devices, the PhD project will use objects and their representation in pictures, audio-visual material, texts and others such as drawings. The source material will centre around five designs ranging from punch card machines to mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, and the personal computer. Furthermore, several user studies will reenact how some of the surviving machines can be used to expose differences in the design of these computing devices compared to modern technology.

This project therefore consists of two distinct, but complementary parts, namely public history in the form of blogposts and video material published online, and a traditional historical thesis. In general, the public outreach aims at reaching both amateur and professional historians and computer enthusiasts, allowing people to participate in user studies and comment on ongoing research. The thesis will contain a detailed literature study of gender in computing and of the relation between the design and use of computers on occupational segregation. Furthermore, the thesis also analyses the working conditions for each design, and the media representation thereof.