Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics

In 2021, the American Historical Association published a study on how the American public perceives and understands the past. Almost half of the respondents argued that they turn to Wikipedia to learn about history and acquire a historical understanding of the past. Wikipedia was ranked higher than other historical activities, such as “Historic site visit,” “Museum visit,” “Genealogy work,” “Social media,” “Podcast/radio program,” “History lecture,” and “History-related video game.” These findings combined with the appropriation of Wikipedia’s corpus by ChatGPT and Wikipedia’s partnership with the most central search engine in the digital world, Google, and other digital assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, make clear how crucial the role of Wikipedia in how the public learns about history and makes sense of the past is.

But how is historical knowledge produced on Wikipedia? How do Wikipedia editors engage with historical events of the past and transform the past into historical knowledge? Why do they decide to contribute to the production of history? By placing Wikipedia editors at the center of research inquiry and using multiple methodologies and different kinds of data, this book explores how historical knowledge is produced in one of the most central digital communities of knowledge, Wikipedia.

The book Online Virality, edited by Valérie Schafer and Fred Pailler (C²DH, University of Luxembourg), aims to provide a comprehensive examination of online virality. It explores the many ways we can think about this modern phenomenon and analyse the circulation, reception, and evolution of viral born-digital content. Virality and content sharing always intertwine material, infrastructural, visual and discursive elements. This involves various platforms, stakeholders, intermediaries, social groups and communities that are constantly (re)defining themselves. Regulation, curation and content moderation politics, as well as affects and emotions (fears, humour, empathy, hatred…), are also at the core of online virality.

The publication offers an interdisciplinary overview on online virality by including different types of scientific inputs, such as precise case studies, various methodological approaches (including close and distant reading, visual studies, discourse analysis, etc.), as well as historical and socio-technical analyses. The book is organised around three main topics: Expressions and Genres; Mobilisations and Engagements; Circulation and Infrastructures.

The first part explores the semiotics of virality, the diverse and creative forms of expression, specific genres, the relation to other media, and the affective side of virality, such as using humour or provocation. The second part focuses on the political dimension of memes and viral content and their use in the context of controversy or political and ideological opposition. Finally, the third part delves into the often understudied but essential side of virality, by examining the role of platforms and their curation, in short, the infrastructural dimension of virality. These three parts allow us to question such fundamental notions linked to virality as, among others, circulation, reception, economy of attention, instrumentalisation and affect.

This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, including semiotics, history, information and communication sciences, computer science, digital humanities, media studies. In addition, the contributors approach the question via case studies that allow for a perspective that is not exclusively US and European-centred. Some chapters explore virality in Brazil, Chile, while the book also examines a wide variety of platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, video game platforms, etc.).

The World Wide Web (WWW) and digitisation have become important sites and tools for the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration. Today, some memory institutions use the Internet at a high professional level as a venue for self-presentation and as a forum for the discussion of Holocaust-related topics for potentially international, transcultural and interdisciplinary user groups. At the same time, it is not always the established institutions that utilise the technical possibilities and potential of the Internet to the maximum. Creative and sometimes controversial new forms of storytelling of the Holocaust or more traditional ways of remembering the genocide presented in a new way with digital media often come from people or groups who are not in the realm of influence of the large memorial sites, museums and archives. Such "private" stagings have experienced a particular upswing since the boom of social media. This democratisation of Holocaust memory and history is crucial though it is as yet undecided how much it will ultimately reinforce old structures and cultural, regional or other inequalities or reinvent them.

The “Digital space” as an arbitrary and limitless archive for the mediation of the Holocaust spanning from Russia to Brazil is at the centre of the essays collected in this volume. This space is also considered as a forum for negotiation, a meeting place and a battleground for generations and stories and as such offers the opportunity to reconsider the transgenerational transmission of trauma, family histories and communication. Here it becomes evident: there are new societal intentions and decision-making structures that exceed the capabilities of traditional mass media and thrive on the participation of a broad public.

Despite a variety of theoretical and practical undertakings, there is no coherent understanding of the concept of scale in digital history and humanities, and its potential is largely unexplored. A clearer picture of the whole spectrum is needed, from large to small, distant to close, global to local, general to specific, macro to micro, and the in-between levels.

The book addresses these issues and sketches out the territory of Zoomland, at scale. Four regions and sixteen chapters are conceptually and symbolically depicted through three perspectives: bird’s eye, overhead, and ground view. The variable-scale representation allows for exploratory paths covering areas such as: theoretical and applicative reflections on scale combining a digital dimension with research in history, media studies, cultural heritage, literature, text analysis, and map modelling; creative use of scale in new digital forms of analysis, data organisation, interfaces, and argumentative or artistic expressions.

Zoomland provides a systematic discussion on the epistemological dimensions, hermeneutic methods, empirical tools, and aesthetic logic pertaining to scale and its innovative possibilities residing in humanities-based approaches and digital technologies.

Enter the Zoomland game here or watch the teaser!

Die historische Forschung und Lehre haben sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten tiefgreifend verändert durch die Digitalisierung von Quellen, Methoden, Werkzeugen, Forschungsumgebungen und Publikationsinfrastrukturen. Massendigitalisierungsprojekte ermöglichen einen zeit- und ortsunabhängigen Zugang zu Quellen und Literatur. Kommerzielle und Open-Source-Programme stehen bereit, um mittels qualitativer und/oder quantitativer Datenanalyse verschiedene methodische Verfahren zur Erforschung und Interpretation dieser Quellen anzuwenden. Die Fachinformation, Wissenschaftskommunikation und das wissenschaftliche Publizieren haben sich ins Netz verlagert und schließen sowohl partizipative als auch kollaborative Medien ein. Zugleich hat die Bandbreite an digitalen Lehrmethoden stark zugenommen, während die Online-Präsentation von Forschungsergebnissen und Citizen-Science-Projekten den Dialog und das aktive Einbinden der breiten Öffentlichkeit in den Forschungsprozess ermöglicht.

Der Band versammelt Beiträge einer Tagung, die 2021 stattfand und Bilanz zog: Welche Veränderungen in der Art, wie heute Geschichtsforschung durchgeführt und kommuniziert wird, ermöglicht die Digitalisierung? Welche neuen Objekte, Methoden und Werkzeuge der Analyse stehen den Forschenden heute zur Verfügung und zu welchen Forschungsergebnissen führen sie diese?

As in all fields and disciplines of the humanities, Jewish Studies scholars find themselves confronted with the rapidly increasing availability of digital resources (data), new technologies to　interrogate and analyze them (tools), and the question of how to critically engage with these developments. This volume discusses how the digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies. It explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems that Jewish Studies scholars confront. In a field characterised by dispersed sources, and heterogeneous scripts and languages that speak to a multitude of cultures and histories, of abundance as well as loss, what is the promise of Digital Humanities methods--and what are the challenges and pitfalls?

The articles in this volume were originally presented at the international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age, which was organised at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at University of Luxembourg in January 2021. The first big international conference of its kind, it brought together more than sixty scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies.

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers has changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers.

This volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up.

‘impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past’ is an interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools to digitised historical newspapers and integrates the resulting data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text mining tools and their use by humanities researchers is at the heart of the impresso enterprise.

Digital history is commonly argued to be positioned between the traditionally historical and the computational or digital. By studying digital history collaborations and the establishment of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Kemman examines how digital history will impact historical scholarship. His analysis shows that digital history does not occupy a singular position between the digital and the historical. Instead, historians continuously move across this dimension, choosing or finding themselves in different positions as they construct different trading zones through cross-disciplinary engagement, negotiation of research goals and individual interests.

The archive of science is a place where scientific practices are sedimented in the form of drafts, protocols of rejected hypotheses and failed experiments, obsolete instruments and other vestiges. As science goes increasingly digital, so does its archive, opening up new ways of understanding the making of scientific knowledge for historians. Digital collections clearly differ from the traditional lieux de mémoire. What they store are not tangible and authentic objects, but data to be processed by computer algorithms. How do these digital infrastructures shape our encounter with the scientific past? What insights can we gain from the vestiges of science as they turn into data?

Positioned at the intersection of Science Studies, Media Studies, and Digital Humanities, this book critically examines digital archives of science as (new) infrastructures for the representation and production of memory and knowledge. Drawing on a large corpus of scientific collections across disciplines and combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, it explores the boundaries and possibilities that digital archives introduce for the history of science and technology.