Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History

Focusing on Lichtwark’s concept of museology, this article shows what role he envisaged for art in public life at a time when the rise of mass consumption and popular culture created new lifestyles. Lichtwark’s concept of artistic and aesthetic education did not only extend to museums and classrooms but also to dilettantism as a basis for educating taste and developing an appreciation of the arts that would have a positive economic impact. The article looks at the contemporary entanglements and different contexts of Lichtwark’s ideas and relates them to recent approaches to cultural learning. Generally speaking, it argues that concepts of cultural learning are a bundle of entangled threads that connect and concern not only the sphere of art but also contradictory values and norms, economic production, and the emergence of new important status groups such as consumers.

The location choice of Stone Age settlements has been long considered to be influenced by environmental conditions. Proximity to water and sandy soils are most typical examples of those conditions. The notion of the influence resulted from the evidence from a relatively small amount of sites. During the recent decades the number of known settlements has increased to a level where statistical assessment of relation between environmental characteristics and settlement location choice is possible. To undertake this task we collected data about known Estonian Stone Age settlements and acquired environmental data of their locations using publicly available geological datasets. We provide univariate descriptive statistics of the distributions of variables describing site conditions and compare them to characteristics generally present in the environment. We experiment with a set of environmental variables including soil type, distance to water and a selection of geomorphometry derivatives of the digital elevation model. Quantitative assessment confirmed previous observations showing a significant effect towards the choice of sandy, dry location close to water bodies. The statistical analysis allowed us to assess the effect size of different characteristics. Proximity to water had the largest effect on settlement choice, while soil type was also of considerable importance. Abstract geomorphological variables such as Topographic Position Index and Topographic Wetness index also inform us about significant effects of surface forms. Differences of settlement locations during stages of the Stone Age are well observable. The environmental conditions of sites from the pre-pottery Mesolithic follow the general pattern but with the greater variation. Narva and Comb Ware stage settlement locations preferences are nearly identical to each other showing preference of sandy higher areas near the shoreline and indicating increased site investment. For Corded Ware period a new settlement mode is observable which is no longer directly related to water bodies and can be explained by semi-agrarian subsistence and decreasing dependence on aquatic resources.

Having good knowledge and comprehension of history is believed to be important for a variety of reasons. Microblogging platforms could offer good opportunities to study how and when people explicitly refer to the past, in which context such references appear and what purpose they serve. However, this area remains unexplored. In this paper we report the results of a large scale exploratory analysis of history-focused references in microblogs based on 11-months long snapshot of Twitter data. We are the first to analyze general historical references in Twitter based on large scale data analysis. The results of this study can be used for designing content recommendation systems and could help to improve time aware search applications.

This paper presents an overview of the LL(O)D and NLP methods, tools and data for detecting and representing semantic change, with its main application in humanities research. The paper’s aim is to provide the starting point for the construction of a workflow and set of multilingual diachronic ontologies within the humanities use case of the COST Action Nexus Linguarum, European network for Web-centred linguistic data science, CA18209. The survey focuses on the essential aspects needed to understand the current trends and to build applications in this area of study.

Abstract This article provides an overview of how public historians and other actors collect material on the global COVID-19 pandemic. Their common goal is to archive a diversity of perspectives to document these historic times. Focusing on initiatives that collect from a broader public and that incorporate some sort of crowdsourcing, I distinguish between two approaches: projects that collect something specific and projects that formulate their call more openly. The article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, what opportunities they open up, and what limits they impose on future research on the pandemic. The 10 selected case studies are based in 10 different countries, represent the variety of institutions that are involved in participatory collecting, and have all published their collections online and are thus useful for teaching and research worldwide.

The automated enrichment of mass-digitised document collections using techniques such as text mining is becoming increasingly popular. Enriched collections offer new opportunities for interface design to allow data-driven and visualisation-based search, exploration and interpretation. Most such interfaces integrate close and distant reading and represent semantic, spatial, social or temporal relations, but often lack contrastive views. Inspect and Compare (I&C) contributes to the current state of the art in interface design for historical newspapers with highly versatile side-by-side comparisons of query results and curated article sets based on metadata and semantic enrichments. I&C takes search queries and pre-curated article sets as inputs and allows comparisons based on the distributions of newspaper titles, publication dates and automatically generated enrichments, such as language, article types, topics and named entities. Contrastive views of such data reveal patterns, help humanities scholars to improve search strategies and to facilitate a critical assessment of the overall data quality. I&C is part of the impresso interface for the exploration of digitised and semantically enriched historical newspapers.

Abstract The paper presents Intergraph, a graph-based visual analytics technical demonstrator for the exploration and study of content in historical document collections. The designed prototype is motivated by a practical use case on a corpus of circa 15.000 digitized resources about European integration since 1945. The corpus allowed generating a dynamic multilayer network which represents different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections. To our knowledge, Intergraph is one of the first interactive tools to visualize dynamic multilayer graphs for collections of digitized historical sources. Graph visualization and interaction methods have been designed based on user requirements for content exploration by non-technical users without a strong background in network science, and to compensate for common flaws with the annotation of named entities. Users work with self-selected subsets of the overall data by interacting with a scene of small graphs which can be added, altered and compared. This allows an interest-driven navigation in the corpus and the discovery of the interconnections of its entities across time.

Apresentação do dossiê "História global e digital: novos horizontes para a investigação histórica".

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, historians – along with archivists and other stakeholders – began to initiate digital memory banks, inviting members of the public to upload personal stories, pictures, videos, or other material connected to the pandemic and its impact on everyday life. This article describes how platforms from Western and Central Europe differ with regard to contributions by children and adolescents, taking the German coronarchiv.de and covidmemory.lu from Luxembourg as the main case studies. Submissions come in various forms, but photographs are the most frequent, echoing the visual bias of social media. By means of selected contributions, the article illustrates the range of topics that can be of interest to future historians of education. The platforms show how COVID-19 influenced not only practices of education, with the introduction of homeschooling, but also the content of teaching, as seen in the many pandemic-related assignments uploaded. In this respect, it is crucial to acknowledge that there are significant gaps in the collections. Most notably, the first wave of infections in Europe is overrepresented, and people that were most existentially affected by the pandemic are underrepresented. Performing a thorough source critique on a selection of contributions, we argue that, despite these gaps, digital memory banks on the pandemic are of significant value for a future historiography of education, as long as the available metadata of the individual submissions are as complete and transparent as possible.

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.

Inductive locational models have been used for decades to map the probability of past settlements and identify the preferred environmental conditions for habitation. In this study we apply inductive modelling to compare the spatial structure of the settlement systems of hunter-fisher-gatherer groups (Narva and Combed Ware Culture) and early agrarian communities (Corded Ware Culture) in Stone Age Estonia. We conceptualise settlement system formation as a point process and develop a first order point process model representing the environmental suitability for habitation based on geomorphological, soil and proximity to water. We use MaxEnt and the SDMTune machine learning framework for building the model, variable selection and estimation. The model is applied to the two communities and the effects of the variables and the resulting spatial patterns compared. The statistical analysis indicated higher predictive power for hunter-fisher-gatherer sites, which might result from higher variety of agrarian activities, different socio-economic organization or effects of spatial structure of the landscape. The spatial comparison indicates significant differences between the suitable environments for habitation between the two groups. While the hunter-fisher-gatherer population had an entirely shoreline connected settlement system the Corded Ware people inhabited the areas further away from water bodies. This resulted in significantly expanded potential space with differing spatial configuration for the incoming agrarian groups, possibly allowing tolerated immigration. The results also indicate there was a certain overlap of areas considered suitable habitation by both cultural groups, which might have caused a competition for land.

Despite the fact that new media are continually seen as “natural born killers” of old media, old media rarely die and very often persist. In what is alternately called the “age of the Internet,” the “digital revolution,” the “metaverse,” the era of “artificial intelligence,” old media such as books, cinema, radio, television, analogue photography, and several others are still in use. Moreover, there is a kind of re-emergence of “the analogue” in various forms and for different incentives, including nostalgia. This Thematic Section is the outcome of an intellectual journey that the five editors undertook first separately and then combined. The occasion for bringing together prior interests and combining theoretical and empirical understandings of the reasons why and the different modes how media persist over time was facilitated by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) virtual post-conference (co-)organized jointly by three ECREA sections in September 2021: the Communication History section together with the sections of Radio and Sound, as well as Television Studies. It is no coincidence that these three sections are concerned with old media, which seem to decline but apparently also do persist, as those are the sections dealing with the mediated relationship of the old and the new, the past and the present such as the viewing and screening practices of television, transformation of sonic environment from radio toward podcast, and in general old media remediating into new ones.

This thesis is built upon an experimental study of doing digital public history. I aim to study the digital interferences of the digital component on the historiographic operation as a whole. While the fields of digital and public history are advancing fast with abundant work on development and application of new methodologies, tools and approaches, the discipline of history is still lagging behind in terms of theoretical reflection on the new practices emerging from it. Researchers have been exploring alternative forms of source criticism, storytelling and publications for years now, yet the greatest attention still goes to the outputs, while little criticism, if any, is devoted to the process of doing digital work. By building and analysing a digital public history platform, this research aims to make a contribution in this direction. To do so, the research takes a fully hands-on approach and offers an evaluation of digital methods that to great extent emerge from practice and the researcher’s first-hand experience with the digital. The empirical study consisted of investigating memories of Italian and Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg through the establishment of a collaboratively shaped digital memory platform. The process of building the Memorecord platform, activating the crowdsourcing through social media and analysing the born-digital data originated from this collection informed the theoretical reflection of this thesis. While in the more practical layer, hands-on work and collaboration were highlighted, from the more speculative layer, the main theoretical contribution verse on the hybridisation of old and practices and capacities synthesized in the emergence of a hermeneutics of practice, derived from the heuristics gesture of creative and playful experimentation, (i.e. thinkering) around the digital tools and methods. This specific hermeneutical approach may function as a visibility broker, assisting historians in the process of unveiling the unspoken and implicit aspects of historical inquiry in the digital age. Hermeneutics of practice, hence, should facilitate the identification of the digital interferences we encounter throughout the research process and improve the researcher’s readiness to face the new research conditions placed by the digital component. If a new style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history should be stabilised, hermeneutics of practice could become an important procedure to ensure historical objectivity in 21st Century.

This contribution discusses the evaluation steps and concerted efforts towards transparency and replicability taken during the development of the <em>GeoNewsMiner</em>[1] (Viola et al 2019 - GNM), an interactive app that maps and visualizes geographical references in historical immigrant newspapers. It describes how the goal of achieving transparency and replicability influenced the methodological decisions made in the process as well as the lessons learned from the experience. The overarching aim is to contribute to the methodological foundations of DH, arguing in favour of clearer explanations of methods and practices both to engage less technical scholars and to advance the field as a whole. [1] https://utrecht-university.shinyapps.io/GeoNewsMiner/

This article seeks to identify the factors that have led researchers to root their historical approach in a national or regional context, rather than a global one. This may seem paradoxical when the Internet is thought to be global, and digital content and cultures at least partially cross-borders. These approaches are determined by reactions to a history of the Internet that has been far too focused on the United States from the outset, by a desire to consider this history in a given context, and by the historical sources. However, the use of national and regional approaches does not preclude the stimulating comparative or transnational perspectives that may renew this history in terms of infrastructure, missing narratives and user participation, as well as technical and human networks. We even suggest that studying the history of the places, people and communities that remain outside networks (whether by choice or by necessity) could tell us a lot about the global and asymmetric reality of the Internet.

Text Reuse reveals meaningful reiterations of text in large corpora. Humanities researchers use text reuse to study, e.g., the posterior reception of influential texts or to reveal evolving publication practices of historical media. This research is often supported by interactive visualizations which highlight relations and differences between text segments. In this paper, we build on earlier work in this domain. We present impresso Text Reuse at Scale, the to our knowledge first interface which integrates text reuse data with other forms of semantic enrichment to enable a versatile and scalable exploration of intertextual relations in historical newspaper corpora. The Text Reuse at Scale interface was developed as part of the impresso project and combines powerful search and filter operations with close and distant reading perspectives. We integrate text reuse data with enrichments derived from topic modeling, named entity recognition and classification, language and document type detection as well as a rich set of newspaper metadata. We report on historical research objectives and common user tasks for the analysis of historical text reuse data and present the prototype interface together with the results of a user evaluation.

Abstract In Italian, the adjective giusto (‘right’) has performed the discourse function of response marker since at least 1613 (DELI 2008: 671). In this paper, I argue that the adjective has recently undertaken a new process of discoursivization, defined as the diachronic process that ends in discourse ( Ocampo 2006 : 317). In particular, I maintain that giusto may also serve the function of invariant tag ( Andersen 2001 ), a linguistic item appended to a statement for the purpose of seeking mutual agreement, verification or corroboration of a claim ( Millar and Brown 1979 ). Through diachronic lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries and language corpora of different varieties, the results will show that, although the use of giusto? as invariant tag is currently undocumented, records of such a use are in fact found since 1990. I explore whether there are positive correlations between the use of right ? in English and the use of giusto ? in real use Italian and AV dialogues.

Cultural policy has been analysed from various perspectives, ranging from sociology over cultural studies to political science. Historians have also been interested in cultural policy, but they have barely reflected on a theoretical framework. In addition, cultural policy has not been thoroughly researched in Luxembourg. The present thesis aims to contribute to this gap and examines how national cultural policy in Luxembourg evolved from the 1920s to the early 1970s. It investigates the presence of the national idea in cultural policy, and possible tensions and connections between the idea of the nation and the use or inclusion of foreign cultural references. Drawing on the concept of Zwischenraum (intermediate space) coined by the historian Philip Ther, the study considers Luxembourg as a nationalised intermediate space with the tensions that this status entails. Furthermore, it investigates how the State Museums, particularly the history section, evolved in the cultural policy context. To analyse the evolution of cultural policy, three interconnected aspects are considered: structures, actors and discourses. Three main periods are considered in a chronological fashion: the interwar period marked by efforts of nation-building and an increasingly interventionist state; the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg (1940-1944), when the idea of an independent nation-state was turned into its opposite; the post-war period until the early 1970s, subdivided into an immediate post-war period marked by restitution and reconstruction, and the 1950s and the 1960s characterised by a state-administrator and a conservative cultural policy. These periods, however, are not always neatly separable and reveal continuities. For each period, the State Museums are analysed in their cultural policy context: from their construction in the age of nation-building, over their ambiguous situation during Nazi occupation, to their new missions in the post-war period.

Medical histories of Belgium reshapes Belgian history of medicine by bringing together a new generation of scholars. Going beyond a chronological narrative, the book offers new insights by questioning classic themes of the history of medicine: physicians, institutions and the nation state. While retracing specific Belgian characteristics, it also engages with broader European developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Medical histories of Belgium will appeal to Historians of Belgium in various subfields, especially cultural history and political history and medical historians and medical practitioners seeking the historical context of their activities

Research assessment reform is crucial for the social sustainability of research infrastructures (RIs): RIs can only thrive in the long term if the researchers who contribute to their development and growth receive academic credit for the kind of work they do in and around research infrastructures. To put it bluntly, research infrastructures have a vested interest in supporting the reform of research assessment. But, conversely, ongoing attempts to reform research assessment can also benefit from the work of research infrastructures because RIs have a great deal of experience creating and maintaining public services for producing, curating and harvesting both traditional and non-traditional academic outputs. The goal of this paper is to outline DARIAH’s position on the importance of research assessment reform for thematic RIs and the importance of thematic RIs for research assessment reform at the European level.