Data

Many network analysis projects rely on somewhat ready-made sources for data; for example, email logs, questionnaires, church registers, letter exchanges and trade relations make it relatively easy to identify who is connected to whom and how. It is, however, considerably more difficult to extract quantifiable data from text. Some issues to consider here are: how can we bridge the gap between the depth of hermeneutics and data analysis? How can we systematize text interpretation?

Avec la défaite française de 1871, la frontière séparant la France de l’Allemagne se voit déplacée du Rhin aux Vosges. La quasi-totalité de l’Alsace, une partie de la Lorraine, et plus d’un million et demi de personnes passent sous le drapeau du Reich. Pendant près d’un demi-siècle, la vie quotidienne des populations, devenues frontalières, s’en trouve métamorphosée.

Digital heritage acquires a definition and an international status in 2003 when a charter is devoted to it by UNESCO. Whether digitised or born-digital, digital heritage has become an entire area of the conservation work of heritage institutions, particularly large national libraries, faced with the need to preserve an increasing volume of so-called born-digital documents. Work has gone on since the 1990s to digitize documents, press content and paper books. Digital heritage didn’t wait until 2003 to gain momentum.

This paper will explore a key question for historians today: what are the politics of cultural heritage digitisation and its implications for historical research? And how to assess this from a global perspective? In a research environment that increasingly privileges what is available online, the questions of why, where, and how we can access what we can access, and how it affects historical research have become ever more urgent.

The rise of online experiences in the domain of cultural heritage offers new forms of interaction that are no longer limited by the physical presence of museums. However, sustaining online visitors’ engagement is challenging, and museum professionals seek to understand how to increase motivation. We conducted a user study (N = 32) of three museum websites to investigate users’ intrinsic motivations to engage with the sites through observation, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews.

Der europäische Jahrmarkt hat sich im Laufe der Zeit vom Markt zum populären Fest entwickelt und wurde in der Nachkriegszeit zu einem wahrlichem Vergnügungsort der Massen. Der jährlich in Luxemburg stattfindende Jahrmarkt „Schueberfouer“ ist ein exemplarisches Beispiel für diese Entwicklung.

Web content and social networks are highly ephemeral and claim for fast reactions in case of disruptive events, in order to preserve them. As demonstrated with the Yugoslavian wars, national domains can disappear (Ben-David, 2016). Web archiving and the practice of collecting and preserving born digital content have been widely adopted by national libraries in Europe (in France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Denmark and many other countries) since the 2000s (Brügger, 2018).

Roundtable ‘War, Communication, and Media Resilience in Europe’ with Gabriele Balbi, Christian Schwarzenegger, Valérie Schafer, Marie Cronqvist and Martin Lundqvist Chair: Rosanna Farbøl (Lund University)

The exposome complements information captured in the genome by covering all external influences and internal (biological) responses of a human being from conception onwards. Such a paradigm goes beyond a single scientific discipline and instead requires a truly interdisciplinary approach. The concept of “historical exposomics” could help bridge the gap between “nature” and “nurture” using both natural and social archives to capture the influence of humans on earth (the Anthropocene) in an interdisciplinary manner.

Activity Report Europe Direct at the University of Luxembourg (1st May 2021-31 December 2022). Europe Direct at the University of Luxembourg (2021-2025) is a competitive public history project co-funded by the European Union.