C²DH digital resources

WW2.lu. Luxemb(o)urg in the Second World War is an online exhibition developed by the C²DH of the University of Luxembourg based on a 2021 convention with the Ministry of State. The aim of the exhibition is to present the history of Luxembourg during the Second World War, taking account of recent historical research. To this end, it relies on the advantages of the digital format. The exhibition makes it possible to approach the experiences of Luxembourgers from different perspectives by drawing on rich and often unknown documentation. Between ‘Luxembourg’ and ‘Luxemburg’, the population faced the Germanisation efforts of the Nazi regime. The period of annexation shows a torn society whose first concern was to cope with everyday life in an exceptional situation. The online exhibition is interested in all those whose fate was linked to Luxembourg in the period 1940-1945. The experiences of persecution, opposition and resistance are present, as are those of adaptation and collaboration as well as resignation and arrangements. The main aim is to show the often complex decisions faced by individuals and collectives and how their decisions developed during the four years under German rule. Thanks to its various forms of presentation and its multilingualism, ww2.lu is aimed at a wide audience. 33 video clips create a panorama of known and unknown places for this period of history. They consist of testimonies, interviews with historians, archive films and two animated cartoons. 

Historesch Gesinn aims to be a bridge between historians and the public, communicating about the past in the present. Traditionally history is written by the elite, leaving out important insights about the everyday life and the perspective of minorities. Historesch Gesinn invites the citizens to contribute to the ongoing historical research, and thus support researchers create a more complete image of the past.

The Historesch Gesinn platform is a collaborative project with a constantly changing group of scholars and partners. Each research theme has an assigned researcher and will work together with institutions that are relevant to that research theme.

Between 1860 and 1980, around 1,500 miners lost their lives in Luxembourg, prompting the municipality of Kayl to erect the National Miners’ Monument in the 1950s near the Léiffrächen pilgrimage site. The monument features 26 stone tablets, 20 of which list the names of victims of mining accidents. These inscriptions are based on the “Registry of Mining Victims,” compiled by Emile Gelhausen and preserved in the Kayl municipal archive. The website, developed by the C²DH in collaboration with the ITM and local authorities, updates and improves this historical data and welcomes public contributions.

WARLUX investigates the experiences of young Luxembourgers, born between 1920 and 1927, who were forcibly conscripted into Nazi German organizations such as the Wehrmacht and the Reichsarbeitsdienst during World War II. Key aspects of the project include a database detailing information on 304 young men from Schifflange, including their service records, biographical data, and instances of desertion or draft evasion, a digital collection of 163 transcribed letters exchanged by Luxembourgish soldiers during the war, offering personal insights into their experiences as well as crowdsourced contributions from families, providing personal narratives that enrich the understanding of this period. 

With the idea of building a bridge between the dead and the living, the C²DH with the Fondation luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (FLMS) have set themselves the task of building a digital memorial to the memory of people who lived in Luxembourg and were persecuted for racial reasons before and during the Second World War.

The main objective of the memorial is to retrace as far as possible the life of these men, women and children, the environment in which they lived in Luxembourg before the Shoah and to describe their fate during the Second World War.

This scientific and public project, in which more than thirty historians are already participating, is open to all interested parties, researchers, survivors, descendants of the victims, associations and schools. Everyone interested is invited to contribute to the Memorial.

It is meant to be a digital participatory project devoted to research, identify, tell the stories of members of the Luxembourgish society in the inter-war period as well as Jewish refugees fleeing from other parts of Europe to Luxembourg in the 1930s, who became the victims of racial anti-Jewish legislation in their home countries and afterwards in Luxembourg during German occupation beginning with the invasion of the Grand Duchy by the Wehrmacht on 10 May 1940.

As an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal, the Journal of Digital History (JDH) sets new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles. The journal aims to become the central hub of critical debate and discussion in the field of Digital History by offering an innovative publication platform, promoting a new form of data-driven scholarship and of transmedia storytellingin the historical sciences. The Journal is a joint initiative of C²DH and the De Gruyter publishing group.

Deep down in the wildernss of Brazil's tropical forest stands an enormous steel empire, meticulously crafted by the mysterious Colônia Luxemburguesa. One hundred years ago, the Luxembourg-based steel giant Arbed – today ArcelorMittal – inaugurated its Brazilian subsidiary called Companhia Siderúrgica Belgo Mineira in the heart of the State of Minas Gerais. At that time, the lack of qualified workforce provoked a massive movement of hundreds of Luxembourgish migrants to Brazil in order to erect a colossal steel plant and its surrounding industrial city, giving birth to the cradle of the Brazilian steel industry.

While searching for her own identity, Luxembourg-Brazilian filmmaker and historian Dominique Santana makes a fateful discovery as she comes across João Monlevade, an incredible and oddly familiar tropical version of the industrial south of Luxembourg she grew up in. This staggering revelation pulls her into a fascinating quest behind the curtains of the mythical stories of the Colônia Luxemburguesa. What is this Colônia like? Was it a success story of integration into the Brazilian society - a success story at all? 

"A Colônia Luxemburguesa" is a collaboration between the C²DH, Samsa Film and the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) with the support of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the Film Fund Luxembourg, Esch2022 European Capital of Culture, the Fondation Emile Metz-Tesch and the Rotary Club Esch-Bassin Minier.

The virtual exhibition “BGL: L’histoire d’un siècle”, developed by the C²DH to mark the centenary of BGL BNP Paribas, covers the history of the bank from its beginnings in 1919 to the present day, as well as its role and participation in the economy and development of Luxembourg. For this project, C²DH researchers were able to access the bank’s archives. This research was particularly important and relevant for the historiography of the country, given the significant role of BGL BNP Paribas as a catalyst for both the Luxembourg economy and the development of Luxembourg as a financial centre. 

In partnership with the BGL BNP Paribas.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an event whose historic dimension is immediately obvious. Comparisons with the Spanish flu at the end of the First World War and the (uniquely Western) assessment that it is the greatest crisis since the Second World War are on everyone’s lips. Luxembourg’s state of emergency has led to unprecedented restrictions in our private and professional lives. With the online platform #covidmemory, the C²DH offers all people living or working in Luxembourg the opportunity to share their experiences and preserve them for future generations. Anyone can upload photos, videos or texts to this open and free web-based platform, allowing us to document how the pandemic has changed our lives.     

With the support of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). 

The #DHJewish - Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities website offers a single access point to news, events and projects on the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities. Furthermore, we provide access to a DHJewish Zotero bibliography and online community on Zulip. 

The origins of this website go back to 2015 when Michelle Chesner, the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University, began collecting information about projects that sat at the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities (DH). Her list forms the basis of the directory of projects on this website. 

The website itself came about as a result of several workshops. In 2018 work on the project began at the C²DH, led by Gerben Zaagsma and using Michelle Margolis' original list of projects as its starting point.

The C²DH hosts a very popular platform on European integration process with a strong national and international following. Collections about the historical events in European integration and about the development of the main international organisations offer more than ...  key documents (texts, images, cartoons, audio and video) to the users. An oral history program, including nearly 100 interviews with eminent European figures, completes this rich documentary collections. 

All the collections are aimed at both the research and teaching communities and the general public, with the aim of improving understanding about the process of European unification and its historical, legal, political and economic dimensions. The research and publication activities were mainly carried out by the CVCE, now taken over by the C²DH. 

The digital exhibition Éischte Weltkrich: Remembering the Great War in Luxembourg is a project developed by the C²DH with the aim of addressing an important but neglected and understudied period in the country’s history.

Supported by the Ministry of State and drawing on the collections and expertise of some of the major Luxembourg museums, archives and cultural institutions, the project has progressively deepened and widened its scope, aspiring to become a long-term digital resource.

The website is designed to engage a broad base of users with varying interests and degrees of expertise. It offers four independent but interconnected modes of navigation: a thematic, story-driven mode; a digital archive; an interactive geo-referenced map and a timeline. Additional sections of the website contain educational pages for schools and downloadable academic articles. 

With the support of the Ministry of State.

"Framing Luxembourg” is a virtual exhibition and timeline that looks back at the history of public statistics in Luxembourg. The aim is to showcase the key statistics associated with some of the milestones in the country’s history in a fun and novel way. Framing Luxembourg is a gateway to STATEC’s statistical services and library. It also serves as a simplified visual aid for the content of a book currently being written by Paul Zahlen. The project was carried out in collaboration with STATEC, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and Paul Zahlen.

Leveraging an unprecedented corpus of newspaper and radio archives, impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past uses machine learning to pursue a paradigm shift in the processing, semantic enrichment, representation, exploration, and study of historical media across modalities, time, languages, and national borders.

impresso develops two types of interfaces to access our data: the impresso web app offers a graphical user interface for exploration and the compilation of research datasets and the forthcoming impresso data lab is an infrastructure for data access and annotation services via APIs, along with their integration in executable Jupyter notebooks.

The datasets include 76 newspapers, 600,919 issues, 5,429,656 pages scanned, 47,798,468 content items identified, 3,462,799 images and 12,493,358,703 words.

An interdisciplinary team of designers, digital humanists, computational linguists and historians has joined forces to develop a co-designed tool to monitor the media of the past. impresso is a collaborative project between C²DH, the Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB) at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the History department at the University of Lausanne and the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Zurich University.

Funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

Developed by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, IWalk unlocks a new window into our past. Visitors and students at authentic sites of history and memorials can discover curated IWalks—tours that connect specific locations of memory and memorialization with testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocide, violence and mass atrocity. Looking more specifically at Luxembourg, there are more than a hundred testimonies of survivors telling their stories from the pre-war and post-war years. Their narrations are a valuable record of the experiences, emotions and feelings of the Luxembourgish Jewish population within the country’s collective post-war memory. 

The Minett Stories is a virtual exhibition explores the history and identity of the Minett, the industrial region in southern Luxembourg, in 21 chapters. For a century (approx. 1870-1970) the Minett was shaped by iron ore mining and the iron and steel industry. Rapid economic and population growth, urbanisation and labour migration had a major impact on the history of the region, which has also been shaped by economic crises, environmental pollution and precarious housing and living conditions.

The exhibition is part of the Remixing Industrial Pasts in the Digital Age (“Remix”) project coordinated by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), which was launched in autumn 2019 and is funded by the European Capital of Culture Esch2022 asbl.

The Minett Stories virtual exhibition was developed in collaboration between the Remix team, Milan-based design studio Calibro and Bergamo-based software company Inmagik. The Remix team spent two and a half years researching and sourcing material, designing the exhibition and writing all the storyboards, scripts, story texts and captions for the 22 exhibition chapters. The focus was on various forms of transmedia storytelling, including interactive video documentaries, graphic novels, interactive maps, interactive podcasts and radio plays. The virtual exhibition was launched online on 28 May 2022.

The Popkult60 online exhibition showcases the transnational history of popular culture in the Long Sixties. It is the result of the collaboration between PhD students and postdoctoral researchers of the University of Luxembourg and the University of the Saarland. You may explore the main room by clicking on the various objects and learn more about the individual research projects. Alternatively, he can search a rich collection of objects and sources.  

East Belgium 1920-2020 is a virtual exhibition about the History of the region Eupen-Malmedy-Sankt Vith since the change of nationality in 1920. It is the result of a collaboration between the the C²DH, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and the Zentrum für Ostbelgische Geschichte.  

Ranke.2 is a online open source teaching platform with a series of lessons on digital source criticism. It offers teaching content that can be easily integrated into academic curricula, but it is also suitable for independent learners. As the content of Ranke.2 is directly accessible, lecturers can easily integrate a clip, a quiz or one or more assignments in their teaching. All they have to do is include a link to Ranke.2 either in their slides, in tasks to complete during the lesson, or in homework that is communicated through the Learning Management System. 

Interactive documentary on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge: Schumann’s Eck is a busy crossing in the north of Luxembourg, where the roads from Ettelbruck to Bastogne and from Wiltz to the Upper Sûre Lake intersect. Many people take this road every day, but very few know that they are passing through the site of one of the most gruesome episodes of the Battle of the Bulge. Here, in the Winter of 1944/45, thousands of soldiers and civilians lost their lives.During the 2019 summer semester, students on the Bachelor course in Contemporary History of Luxembourg, in collaboration with the National Museum of Military History in Diekirch, produced an interactive web documentary on the Schumann’s Eck.

In collaboration with the National Museum of Military History in Diekirch.

Tropy is free, open-source software that allows you to organize and describe photographs of research material. Originally created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), Tropy today is jointly developed by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), the RRCHNM and Digital Scholar. Tropy is  funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and benefits from the support of its enthusiastic users, who supply essential feedback, feature requests, issue reports, workshops, and interface translations. All Tropy code is open source and freely available on GitHub.

The virtual exhibition 175 Joer POST tells the story of the Entreprise des Postes et Télécommunications in Luxembourg from the point at which it was founded as an independent postal administration on 20 August 1842 until 2017.

The exhibition, aimed at a wide spectrum of users with varying degrees of expertise, is structured around four independent but interconnected modes of navigation, namely chronological, geographical, collection-based and thematic approaches. It is the result of a research project launched by the C²DH and POST Luxembourg in connection with celebrations for the 175th anniversary of POST Luxembourg.

The Virtual Museum of Russian Emigration was created on the initiative of three parties - the C²DH, the Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines in Dudelange and the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Luxembourg (Russkiy Dom). It aims to give public access to the collected material during the research project of Inna Ganschow at the C²DH.