Thinkering

Historians like to write, and they write a lot. Throughout my studies in history, I was taught how to analyse sources and how to write a scientific work. But I have never been taught how to present my research in a poster format – which requires a minimum amount of creativity.

In Munich, from 19 to 21 September 2018, a group of speech technologists, social scientists, linguists, computer scientists, oral historians and information scientists convened to explore the integration of digital tools in the workflow of scholars who work with interviews.

The aim of the conference was generate and trace the “Provenance of Knowledge” as a core element in documentation. Provenance and Knowledge set a goal to verify the origins of the information and knowledge about an object which correlates to an idea in order to reconstruct the whole chain of creation, use, interpretation and dissemination of particularly information.

Das interdisziplinäre Seminar zu Kreuzungen der russisch-luxemburgischen Geschichte, das vom 2. bis zum 6. Oktober 2018 in Luxemburg unter der Leitung von Dr. Inna Ganschow und Dr. Guido Lessing (C²DH) stattfindet, ist als Studierendenkonferenz konzipiert.

The aim of the “Contemporary history in the digital era – sources, methodologies and criticism” day (Lausanne, 4 July 2018), the result of a partnership between the Universities of Lausanne and Luxembourg, the infoclio.ch website and the International Association of Contemporary History of Europe (IACHE), was to encourage collective reflection on the role of technological innovation in historical research, especially its influence on the historian’s relationship with primary sources.

Du 28 mai au 5 juillet 2018, j'ai eu le plaisir de participer à l'école d'été de l'histoire numérique à Grenoble (France). L’université Grenoble-Alpes en collaboration avec la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme -Alpes et l'UMR Litt&Arts a organisé la seconde édition de l'École D’été Édition Numérique et Humanités Numériques (EDEEN).

From 2 to 5 July 2018, I had the pleasure to participate in the Public History Summer School in Wroclaw (Poland). Not only was it an enriching experience for me, but it also pushed me to think more about the role of public history, its challenges and its opportunities.

On 18-22 June 2018, the C²DH hosted an international Summer School on Transnational Radio History, an event organised in collaboration with the Ministry for Culture in Saarland (Germany) and its Luxembourgish counterpart in the context of the European Year of Culture 2018. By mixing academic panels with hands-on workshops and sites visits, the event was the perfect opportunity for scholars from around the world to hold fascinating discussions on the topic of transnational radio history.

The theme of this year's annual DHBenelux conference was "Integrating Digital Humanities". Max Kemman provides a review of the conference, and how the discussions focused on the integration of the practices of scholars and librarians.

More and more cultural institutions create virtual tours that allow visitors to explore the collections at home instead of actually visiting the institutions. In this blog post, I would like to provide some reflections on virtual tours, their usefulness and their limits.

Some time ago it suddenly hit us that it has been a while since we read an academic book or article in a physical format. This for the simple reason that we can retrace digital information much quicker — i.e. annotating a PDF, extracting highlighted text automatically with ZotFile or quickly looking up a specific word in a pdf document. A second realisation was that as PhD students in the field of digital history and hermeneutics these "small" digital aspects of a scholars life are almost never highlighted.

In the Hands-On History seminar on the 24th of May by Dr. Ludwig M. Vogl-Bienek and Karin Bienek from the University of Trier we were introduced to the history of the magic lantern. After a brief overview during the lecture, we got to experience a live performance of the magic lantern in our Digital History lab. We were also encouraged to experiment with some smaller but original magic lanterns.

Can digital public history help us to reach a historiography that is closer to life?

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.

En menant campagne conjointe aux premières élections européennes au suffrage universel de 1979, Pierre Werner (Luxembourg) et Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb (Belgique) décident d’unir leurs efforts pour favoriser les synergies entre les deux Luxembourg. En 1987 est né le « Cercle européen ‘’Perspectives et réalités frontalières’’», devenu en 2002 le « Cercle Européen Pierre Werner ». Son 30e anniversaire a été célébrée le 22 mars 2018, lors d’une manifestation organisée à Luxembourg par le Cercle, le Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) et leurs partenaires, avec le Ministre des Finances, Pierre Gramegna, comme orateur invité.

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.

Impliqué pendant près de dix ans dans les différentes phases de développement de la Maison de l’histoire européenne à Bruxelles, Étienne Deschamps a partagé cette expérience unique d’histoire publique et son témoignage de praticien avec les participants du séminaire « Hands on History » organisé par le C²DH.

From 19 to 23 February 2018, the C²DH welcomed students in the first year of their master’s degree in history for the third edition of the winter school in digital history. This year, the winter school focused on the creation of a digital archival collection from scratch.