Thinkering

A sneak peek at my upcoming PhD thesis.

The notion of the automaton extends at least as far back as antiquity, but successful implementation of simulated intelligence, and even life itself, continues to elude us. Although there is a tremendous disparity between how we imagine robots to behave and how they actually perform, since the eighteenth century they have become unwitting participants in a dialogue about humanity's self-conception.

Dans la série "Traces of the past", cette affiche de propagande publiée par le mouvement anti-communiste français "Paix et Liberté" durant la guerre froide est passée sous la loupe.

When academics or developers create a website or an application, they usually start from the back end and only then focus on the design or front end. In this blogpost I would like to argue that the design process and user analysis specifically should come first. The methods outlined below were discussed during the workshop on the introduction to user experience design and evaluation methods by dr. Carine Lallemand and dr. Vincent Koenig.

Some time ago, I was wondering whether I could use Google Maps as a tool for my research on the history of the National History and Art Museum in Luxembourg, to adopt a distant reading approach, with the aim to gain new insights. I did it and, in the following blog post, I look back at this small experience.

A new interdisciplinary research group composed of members of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), the Institute for History at the University of Luxembourg and Saarland University will investigate transnational transfers of popular culture in Europe in the 1960s.

Hands-on History session with Karin Bienek and Ludwig Vogl-Bienek (University of Trier).

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.