Based on an initial idea of the centre's director, Ranke.2 is an ongoing educational project of the C²DH initiated in 2018. The project’s team involves a principal investigator who ensures its management and administration, and a postdoctoral researcher in charge of the project and editorial coordination. 2023 was a milestone for the evolution of the project and the team that leads it since two years . The most tangible outcome was to finally achieve the project's multilingual vocation: thus, all the lessons uniquely available in English until then were translated in French and German and are progressively published online. In parallel, all three versions of the website were submitted for being registered as periodical publications by the Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg. Finally, the project has now a more systematized legal approach vis-à-vis the authors of the lessons and the service providers.
Another major evolution concerns quality controls of the published contents. First, the already published lessons were inspected and updated to ensure sustainability and content quality (replacement of broken links, harmonization of citation style, removal of outdated or disparate contents such as quizzes, large format, certain teaching aids). Second, authors and reviewers guidelines were developed in view of establishing a peer reviewing process for the new lessons. Moreover, a new repository was set up to host both submissions and reviews of the lessons to come, in an effort to centralize and document the editorial workflow of the project.
A third series of operations aims at enhancement of the project's existing technical infrastructure by adding search functionalities to the website. These involved a) enrichment and translation of the metadata to describe the lessons, with the establishment of controlled vocabularies to specifically apply to digital history and humanities related contents (based on a selected bibliography and the taxonomy TaDiRAH); b) technical work on developing a search engine for the static website infrastructure c) translations of all the infrastructure data to avoid use of English in the core pages of the French and German versions; d) systematic use of structured metadata to describe contributors, dates, type of publication (e.g. translation) that are now effective and visible through the page that lists the lessons.
A brief video about how digital technology has enhanced our potential to create new realities.
Finally, Ranke.2 engaged in research and community outreach activities. In November 2023, a workshop on what we called the invisible college of digital history sought to bring together cognate publishing initiatives of open educational resources on digital methods for the humanities with which it inaugurated an ongoing collaboration. A panel proposal that emanated from the workshop was submitted jointly with Dariah Campus and Programming Historian and is part of the program of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries 8th Conference (Reykjavik, Iceland, 27-31 May 2024). A second proposal submitted in 2023 was selected and presented as poster at the OPERAS research infrastructure 2024 conference held in Zadar, Croatia, in April 2024.
Thus, Ranke.2 is ready to host brand new contents. By the end of 2023, two new lessons were under development, and despite serious delays in the production, one of them was successfully openly peer reviewed and is expected to be published in June 2024. The second was received in spring 2024 and is due to be published in the second half of 2024.
Based on an initial idea of the centre's director, Andreas Fickers, the project is animated by a core team composed by a PI, a postdoctoral researcher, the centre's lead designer, an assistant developer and, occasionally, student assistants. A first PI/postdoc tandem (Gerben Zaagsma, Stefania Scagliola) conceived and realized the project in collaboration with Daniele Guido and Frédéric Reis from 2018 to 2020. Since 2021, Stefan Krebs is in charge of the project management and administration and Sofia Papastamkou of the project- and editorial coordination.