The C²DH’s international conferences and symposia provide a platform where experts from around the world can share their research and experiences. In 2023, these international gatherings delved into the digital practices of historians, data science methods for historical exploration, and digital gaming within the field of history. Several projects initiated by the centre or in partnership with it examine digital trends, including “WARCnet: web Archives studies network for researching web domains and events”, in cooperation with Aarhus University and the University of London, and “BUZZ-F”, a project related to online virality conducted in close collaboration with the National Library of France. The C²DH also coordinates DARIAH for Luxembourg, an international research infrastructure that serves as a platform for collaboration and innovation in the arts and humanities.
In 2023, to foster intellectual exchanges among researchers, the C²DH hosted 19 visiting scholars from various parts of the world, including the United States, Italy, Kenya, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Ukraine. The C²DH also organised a “Hands-on History” lecture series, featuring presentations by renowned foreign researchers in history and facilitating discussions with the centre’s researchers. From its inception, the C²DH has demonstrated its international aspirations by establishing an international, interdisciplinary research team, which now comprises 26 nationalities, with the aim of collaboratively designing and operating a global open-science platform for historical research.
The C²DH explores the digital turn in historical research in an experimental and interdisciplinary way to produce new historical tools and practices. Current international flagship projects include: impresso, an app developed with academic partners in Switzerland for the advanced exploration of 200 years of historical newspapers based on text mining; Tropy, commercial-grade software for collection and analysis of research images with US partners; and DHARPA, an experimental platform for historical data creation and traceability. The C²DH has also harnessed the potential of digital technologies to create innovative digital scholarly publications as a means of sharing and promoting the results of its research and has established a partnership with academic publisher De Gruyter to develop these new concepts for scholarly publications, leading to the launch of the Journal of Digital History (JDH) with De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Transatlantic Perspectives on Digital Hermeneutics
In 2023, the C²DH digital environment attracted over 1 million visitors and enabled the consultation of 3 million pages about contemporary and digital history. While Luxembourg stands at the forefront in terms of usage, the United States closely follows, surpassing France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The leading users of the Journal of Digital History are American.
The transatlantic relationship extends beyond mere statistics. Collaborative efforts between the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) and the C²DH have been pursued in the field of digital history, encompassing researcher exchanges and knowledge transfer. Sean Takats of the RRCHNM has joined the C²DH as Professor of Digital History and holder of an FNR PEARL Chair, and he now leads the Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA). There are also regular exchanges between visiting researchers. In 2023, Andreas Fickers, director of the C 2DH, was received at the Roy Rosenzweig Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in Washington, while the C2DH welcomed the American researchers Laura Fretwell and Caroline Stuart Greer in Luxembourg.
The C²DH, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Digital Scholar have joined forces to develop Tropy, a free and open-source software tool that allows humanities researchers to make effective use of digital images, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest supporter of the arts and humanities in the US. In 2023, the latest version of Tropy introduced a new project type designed to make Tropy projects more portable and greatly reduce instances of broken paths between images and project files. C2DH also maintains close relations and exchanges with the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington DC.