Innovating & Sharing History: The Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Technologies of History Chapter 6: Digital Histories
It is a truism of the post-Foucauldian world that the very existence of categories of knowledge and institutionalized disciplines shapes what and how we think. Just as the emergence of the photographic apparatus altered nineteenth-century perceptions of the world, 1 increasingly powerful digital tools for storing, retrieving, and combining historical information now impact the way the past is conceived and reconstructed. 2 The global reach and virtually limitless storage capacity of the Internet, in particular, has inspired universities, libraries, and archives to reposition themselves as producers and distributors rather than simply preservers and guarantors of information. As a result, institutional resources are increasingly redirected toward the digitizing and organizing of historical information into databases that are accessible via both public and proprietary computer networks. The growing conception of computers as offering access to a master network of interlocking databases points to a transformation of fundamental notions of the past and the nature of historical research. It is within this milieu that Hal Foster asks, "Is there a new dialectics of seeing allowed by electronic information? . . . Art as image-text, as info-pixel? An archive without museums? If so, will this database be more than a base of data, a repository of the given?" 3 One answer may be found in the movement toward recombinant or "database histories"-that is, histories comprised of not narratives that describe an experience of the past but rather collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated within categories and organized according to predetermined associations. These collections in turn offer users, whether they are artists, gamers, or geeks, both the materials and structures by which the past may be conceived as fundamentally mutable and reconfigurable. Taking advantage of the logics of remix and computational culture and the kinds of repetitions and modifications built into video games, these projects rest along a continuum, moving from serious artworks to pop-culture hacks; however, they share a staunch refusal of the stability of a single "history," instead offering us a relation to the past that is always already open to continual revision and reinterpretation.
2013
Digital humanities seem to be omnipresent these days and the discipline of history is no exception. This introduction is concerned with the changing practice of ‘doing’ history in the digital age, seen within a broader historical context of developments in the digital humanities and ‘digital history’. It argues that there is too much emphasis on tools and data while too little attention is being paid to how doing history in the digital age is changing as a result of the digital turn. This tendency towards technological determinism needs to be balanced by more attention to methodological and epistemological considerations. The article offers a short survey of history and computing since the 1960s with particular attention given to the situation in the Netherlands, considers various definitions of ‘digital history’ and argues for an integrative view of historical practice in the digital age that underscores hybridity as its main characteristic. It then discusses some of the major changes in historical practice before outlining the three major themes that are explored by the various articles in this thematic issue – digitisation and the archive, digital historical analysis, and historical knowledge (re)presentation and audiences.
The Common Landscape of Digital History
Digital Histories, 2020
With the publication of this book a more than ve year long journey is reaching an end and new beginnings. In 2015 a group of historians met up in Helsinki to discuss how we could best promote the development of digital history. Our rst heartfelt thanks therefore go to
Exploring the History of Digital History: Setting an Agenda
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
In 2003 the late American historian and digital history pioneer Roy Rosenzweig wrote that historians were confronted with a "fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance" (Rosenzweig 2003). As more and more historical sources were digitised, Rosenzweig argued that historians urgently needed to rethink their practices. To this day, this diagnosis remains a defining characteristic of doing history after the digital turn. Yet the problem of technologically induced abundance in historical research is far from new. During one of the first computing in the humanities conferences at Yale University in 1965, a predecessor of Rosenzweig, Hayward Alker, already spoke about the need to confront "problems of abundance" in historical research due to the availability of "masses of [digital] historical data" (Alker 1965). This is only one of many possible examples that can serve to illustrate a broader point: key epistemological and methodological questions in what we now call 'digital history' were already debated decades ago by earlier generations of computing historians, yet this is often forgotten. Such forgetfulness is not exclusive to the discipline of history, however, but a consequence of the fact that "the history of computing in the humanities is an almost uncharted research topic" (Nyhan, Flinn and Welsh 2015). As a result, much discourse about digital humanities in the past twenty years is characterised by a rhetoric of radical newness. This situation has recently begun to change, as interest in the history of the digital humanities is growing. These endeavours can be seen as part of a broader process of consolidating the field by excavating its historical and intellectual underpinnings.
Reinterpreting European History Through Technology: The Crosscult Project
2017
European history is an exciting mesh of interrelated facts and events, crossing countries and cultures. However, historic knowledge is usually presented to the non-specialist public (museum or city visitors) in a siloed, simplistic and localised manner. In CrossCult, an H2020-funded EU project that started in 2016, we aim to change this. With an interdisciplinary consortium of 11 partners, from seven European countries we are developing technologies to help answer two intrinsically united humanities challenges...
Digital lieux de mémoire: Connecting history and remembrance through the Internet
ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, 2013
Digital Humanities is an emerging field of knowledge that has triggered scholarly interest throughout the past decade. Architectural historians are also engaging in it, presenting their findings in new ways via multimedia companions to scholarly journals, using advanced techniques of 3D-simulation to study historical built environments, mining data from the growing number of historical sources that became available via digitisation projects, or drawing on data-visualisation software to map networks. The new technologies demand new approaches: as the sources change, what we perceive as sources also changes.Thus, the digital revolution does not only impact on our work procedures, it makes us apprehend the seemingly immaterial contents of the www as new material to work with.Beyond readily accessible digitised databanks, and high resolution photographs in official digital archives, for example, the Internet also offers access to everyday, personal sources on urban history. Non-institutional web presences that address the urban pasts of cities informer European colonies across the world have emerged as potential sources of this kind.Often instigated by former colonials, these websites, which are situated in a liminal space between fact and fiction, pose challenges to architectural historians. Their implications and potentials are discussed here from a Portuguese, a Belgian and an Indian perspective.
Reflecting on European History with the Help of Technology: The CrossCult Project
2016
History, and in particular European history, is not merely a collection of unconnected events, but rather a complex mesh of interrelated facts, events and concepts, taking place within a wider context of previous and contemporary situations. Unfortunately when addressing the wider public, like in schools, museums and cultural spaces, history is often presented in a simplistic, siloed and localistic manner that promotes memorizing rather than understanding, does not account for cross-border cultural aspects and prevents historical events from being viewed as a shared, global experience. The goal of the CrossCult H2020 project, comprising 11 partners from 7 European countries, is to spur a change in the way European citizens appraise, interpret and access history, by enabling new and highlighting existing cross-border connections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens' viewpoints and physical venues. Facilitated by technology and mobile applications, with a strong backg...