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. In the words of Sandra Camarda, curator of the exhibition, “Éischte Weltkrich is an experiment in digital storytelling. It’s a way of uncovering the history of Luxembourg during the Great War, making it accessible to a variety of audiences.”
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. “This exhibition provides a variety of angles (occupation, grief and loss, hunger and aftermath) to explore a historical phenomenon that was also multidimensional,” explains Denis Scuto, project leader. The overall structure of the exhibition remains flexible and open so that it can be constantly enriched with new material, whether provided by institutions or crowdsourced.
The digital exhibition was officially launched on 19 April 2018 at a press conference attended by Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and the Rector of the University of Luxembourg, Stéphane Pallage. For C²DH Director Andreas Fickers, the launch represented an important milestone for the Centre, since “for the first time, it really demonstrates the different ways we want to tell history online, using transmedia storytelling as a new method of engaging the audience in contemporary history”.
The digital exhibition is accompanied by a series of additional events including physical exhibitions, workshops and a special lecture series.
Together with the Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines (CDMH) in Dudelange and in partnership with Dudelange local council, ANLux, the MNHM, the BnL, the CNA and the MNHA, the C²DH prepared the physical exhibition “Être d’ailleurs en temps de guerre (14-18). Étrangers à Dudelange / Dudelangeois à l’étranger” (“Being from another country in wartime (14-18). Foreigners in Dudelange / Dudelangers abroad”), which was unveiled on 27 March 2018. The exhibition, complemented by a video installation by multimedia artists Chiara Ligi and Mauro Macella, explores the link between war and human migrations by looking at the experience of the migrant town of Dudelange during the First World War. The exhibition was accompanied by a lecture series at the CDMH, the University of Luxembourg and the “opderschmelz” regional cultural centre.
Both exhibitions were granted the “2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage” label.
The history of justice in Luxembourg from 1815 to the present day
At a press conference on 29 January 2018, Andreas Fickers (C²DH) and Félix Braz (Ministry of Justice) signed an agreement to launch a research project on the history of justice in Luxembourg.
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Media Monitoring of the past
Impresso is a 3-year collaborative research project between the Digital Humanities Laboratory at EPFL, the Institute for Computational Linguistics at Zurich University and the C²DH, fully funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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Shaping a digital memory platform on migration: a public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories
The Memorecord crowdsourcing initiative is part of the PhD research project entitled “Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives: A public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories in Luxembourg”, conducted by Anita Lucchesi at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
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Populärkultur transnational - Europa in den langen 1960er Jahren
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.
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Platform for teaching digital source criticism
Ranke.2 is a teaching platform that offers lessons on how to critically assess and work with digital historical sources.
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