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Sytze Van Herck

Sytze Van Herck

Former PhD student

research interests
Digital history & historiography Gender studies History of science History of technology Digital History & Hermeneutics Doctoral Training Unit Oral History Workgroup
Sytze was a PhD Candidate working on the history of the design and use of computing devices

Sytze Van Herck was a doctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (University of Luxembourg) until January 2022. Before embarking on this research project, she obtained a Master of Arts in History at the KU Leuven (2015) and a Master in Science in Digital Humanities (2017). Her master thesis in Digital Humanities focussed on visualising the gender balance at both computer science and digital humanities conferences between 2000 and 2015. Her main research interests are intersectionality and gender within the history of computing. More specifically, her work examines occupational segregation, working conditions and gender stereotypes in advertising from the 1930s until the end of the 1980s. Currently she resides in Munich as a scholar-in-residence at the Deutsches Museum.

Sytze successfully defended her thesis in January 2022.

 

Main supervisor: Prof. Dr Andreas Fickers (C²DH)

Other supervisors: Prof. Dr Martin Theobald (University of Luxembourg), Prof. Dr Sally Wyatt (University of Maastricht)

content by this author

Data

13 January 2022

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Re/constructing Computing Experiences. From "punch girls" in the 1940s to "computer boys" in the 1980s.

Thinkering
#LuxLife: Reflections on The Recurated Museum

2 July 2020

written by :
Sytze Van Herck, Christopher Morse

#LuxLife: Reflections on The Recurated Museum

During the summer semester we co-taught a course called The Recurated Museum, which explored the evolving role of museums in digital spaces. After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic mid-semester and the subsequent explosion of movements like #MuseumAtHome and #CultureChezNous, we directly confronted many of the ideas we featured in class in a way that we could not have previously imagined.
Data

8 January 2020

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Punched Cards in Accounting at Helena Rubinstein

Data

27 October 2019

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Rebuilding the Office around the Mainframe: IBM’s S/360 in Context

Data

25 March 2019

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Gendered labour in business computing: the IBM S/360 in practice

Thinkering
Experimental Media Archaeology featuring the Apple IIe

22 January 2019

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Experimental Media Archaeology featuring the Apple IIe

During a research visit to the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder (CO) participants experimented with the Apple IIe. They either played an educational game or wrote a letter on a computer from the 1980s.
Data

1 January 2019

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Visualizing Gender Balance in Conferences

Data

30 November 2018

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

Why Hillary's e-mails were leaked, not Bill's

Thinkering
Digitising the analogue

5 June 2018

written by :
Eva Andersen, Sytze Van Herck

Digitising the analogue

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.
Thinkering
The Historical Art of Projection

29 May 2018

written by :
Eva Andersen, Sytze Van Herck

The Historical Art of Projection

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.
Thinkering
Paper prototype, wireframe

23 March 2018

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

The scientific user experience design method

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.
Data

1 January 2018

written by :
Sytze Van Herck, Antonio Fiscarelli

Mind the Gap: Gender and Computer Science Conferences

Data

27 November 2017

written by :
Tim van der Heijden, Kaarel Sikk, Eva Andersen, Jakub Bronec, Marleen De Kramer, Thomas Durlacher, Antonio Fiscarelli, Jan Lotz, Sytze Van Herck, Christopher Morse, Shohreh Haddadan, Sam Mersch, Ekaterina Kamlovskaya

Presentation of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History – C2DH Doctoral Training Unit

Thinkering
Digital Media and Technology in the classroom and beyond

3 October 2017

written by :
Sytze Van Herck, Richard Legay

Digital Media and Technology in the classroom and beyond

Digital Media and Technology has transformed how we teach, learn and present. In a transferable skills training of the doctoral school here at university, Robert Reuter introduced us to new media and tools that can enhance teaching and learning. Based on the eight learning events defined by Leclercq and Poumay at the university of Liège, we came up with several online tools that can extend and enhance teaching and engage the students or audience.
Thinkering
Linked Open Data Cloud

12 July 2017

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

DHOxSS 2017 - Linked Open Data

Last week I attended the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School and took part in the Linked Open Data workshop. The Summer School started out with TEI courses in 1997, but has now grown to include eight workshop strands for over 250 participants.
Thinkering
Search engine on tablet

12 July 2017

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

The 'neutrality' of search engines

Nearly everyone uses search engines such as Google on a regular basis, and that is no different for researchers at our institution. Powerful as this tool can be, we should be mindful of what lies hidden behind the search bar and what information we receive through these search portals. Search engines are not impartial, nor do they search the entire web. Perhaps we need to think of other places to look for information that are less commercially oriented and supports Open Access.
Thinkering
Map visualisation presentation

23 May 2017

written by :
Sytze Van Herck, Eva Andersen, Jakub Bronec

Visualisation and visual thinking in the Arts and Humanities – New Perspectives in Digital Humanities Conference

In the 2017 edition of the conference, arts and humanities students and early career researchers, regardless of their technical background, were invited to share their ideas and experiences in their creative and scientific encounters with visualisation as it is deployed in and for research across disciplines.
Thinkering
The limitations of data

8 May 2017

written by :
Sytze Van Herck

The limitations of data

Data are not the same as sources and datasets need rigidly defined categories of information which does not allow for deviation and reinforces binary oppositions such as male and female.