Digitization is not research: Theories and practices in the Digital Humanities

L.I.S.A., the scientific platform of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, on July 14, 2016 published a report of the outcome of a symposium that was organised by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and held in the Villa Vigoni in Menaggio at the beautiful Lake of Como, May 26 to 29, 2016. The Villa Vigoni is an instution that “fosters the relationships between Italy and Germany in the fields of scientific research and culture in a European perspective”. Literature was in the focus of the symposium.

The interesting, quite long report was published in German by Julia Menzel: Theorien und Praktiken des Digitalen in den Geisteswissenschaften. Here an English short cut and some comments and links: Continue reading

Clio Guide. A guide to digital resources for historical science

Clio online, the professional portal of the historical sciences in Germany recently published a new manual. It maps the field of digital history including institutional infrastructures and tools. The aim is a practical one: To give a fact-based introduction to the state of digital professional information and an overview of the most important tools and instruments. Thus, it is aimed at both students and teachers, as well as to researcher and historians who need an introduction to the state of the professional information for their area of research.

The guide is structured along the following issues: Digital working methods and techniques, collections, epochs, regions and topic.

The guide is in German and edited by Laura Busse, Wilfried Enderle, Rüdiger Hohls, Gregor Horstkemper, Thomas Meyer, Jens Prellwitz and Annette Schuhmann. You find it here: http://guides.clio-online.de/

Digital History delayed

Digital History is a trend in Switzerland, too. But, its position is not yet a solid one. This becomes evident, if we check the program of the fourth edition of the Historical Days in Switzerland, June 9 to 11, 2016, in Lausanne. Only two panels explicitly discuss digital media and methods: Jan Hodel, Mareike König and Nadine Fink present cases of how historians work with social media. And Anne Jobin, Hannes Mangold, Stefanie Prezioso and Valérie Schafer present the power of algorithms in historical social practices as the dragnet investigation in Switzerland, the regulation of information in France and the search for episodes and their perception in the case of World War I. It will be interesting to hear the comment of Nicolas Cachereau and follow the discussion moderated by Enrico Natale and Christiane Sibille.

In German-speaking countries, the skepticism about these new methods is still quite large, as can be read in an article of Urs Hafner in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of May 27, 2016. Amongst other, he refers to my new book Geschichte Digital – Historische Welten neu vermessen (Kohlhammer) Please find here an English short cut of the book.

Geschichte Digital – Historische Welten neu vermessen

Abbildung 1-1Guido Koller, Geschichte Digital – Historische Welten neu vermessen, Stuttgart, 2016

Die digitale Kommunikation prägt inzwischen das Berufsbild der Historiker entscheidend. Heute ist Norm, was vor 20 Jahren noch Ausnahme war: Historische Welten werden digital vermessen und analog interpretiert. Wie Historiker denken, lehren, schreiben ändert sich durch die Digitalisierung schon heute und wirkt auf das Schreiben von Geschichte zurück: Mit Algorithmen verarbeiten Forscher heute große Datenmengen, die völlig neue Perspektiven und Herangehensweisen an die historischen Quellen ermöglichen. Das Buch beschreibt den Stand des digitalen Wandels für die Geschichte als Teil der Geisteswissenschaften und diskutiert die Perspektiven über die Zukunft des Big Data in den historischen Wissenschaften. Ein Serviceteil, in dem Infrastrukturen, Portale, Tools, Standards und Blogs vorgestellt werden, ergänzt dieses Buch.

Geschichte Digital – Historische Welten neu vermessen (Kohlhammer)

The digital communication characterizes the professional profile of historians. Today is standard, what, 20 years ago, was the exception: Past worlds are measured digitally and interpreted analogously. The digital change captures the production and communication of historical knowledge and affects the writing of history: With algorithms, we process large amounts of data and create a new digital information society, a network, a hybrid constellation of people and things. The book describes the state of the digital change for the History as part of the Humanities and discusses its further perspectives. It includes a service part, where infrastructures, portals, tools, standards and blogs are presented.

Living Books about History

Living Books about History BildLiving Books about History represent a new form of digital anthology. They present short essays on current topics of scholarly interest accompanied by selected contributions that are freely available online.

The project is testing a new form of scholarly publication and aims to draw attention to the potentials of open access by rediscovering and reusing scholarly texts and sources. Contributions:

  • Tara Andrews: Digital Humanities
  • Almut Höfert: Miracels, Marvels and Monsters in the Middle Ages
  • Guido Koller, Sebastian Schüpbach: The History of Modern Administration
  • Martin Lengwiler, Beat Stüdli: History of the Welfare State
  • Daniel Speich Chassé: La situation coloniale

Have a look on Living Books about History. It’s cool.

Digital History: Writing a book with the help of future readers

Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan and Scott Weingart jointly write a book on www.themacroscope.org: Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope. It deals with the chances of digital tools for the humanities. And it asks about the consequences of the digital for understanding the past and the present. The authors are convinced that future historical research must be open and public. They plan to print the book 2015 after a revision due to  comments from (future) readers.

Continue reading

Digital Humanities – Limits and Possibilities: A New Journal in Germany

The new German Zeitschrift für Digitale Geisteswissenschaften (Journal for Digital Humanities) of the Forschungsverbund Marbach, Weimar and Wolfenbüttel, supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung in its first volume discusses limits and possibilities of the Digital Humanities.

The editors, Constanze Baum and Thomas Stäcker, want to present theories, methods and projects of the Digital Humanities in the German speaking part of Europe. Not all texts are already available. But what is there is really interesting – here a small selection of articles:

Continue reading

Pamphlet No 6 – Between Distant and Close reading

Franco Moretti explains the “Operationalizing” of Distant reading in an interesting pamphlet from the Stanford Literary Lab (see below). Operationalization is a process that transforms a concept into a series of operations. This in turn makes it possible to measure objects. In an empirical approach to literature we measure the space which a character occupies in a text. Continue reading

Any room left for freedom in a programmed world? – Vilém Flusser and the Digital Humanitites

Now, if one accepts the basic thesis that the world is experienced, recognized and evaluated in the network of codes, […].

Flusser thinks history as a sequence of codes of an alphabetical order. This suggests a linear historical world. In contrast, Flusser sees the computer as a phenomenon of post-history. It dissolves structural oppositions such as subject and object, nature and culture. Now adays this Decentration is seen as a network phenomena. Continue reading

Virtual History

Bild Ferguson Virtual History2011, Penguin published a book with the promising title: „Virtual History“. There, Niall Ferguson presented 9 articles “towards a ‘chaotic’ theory of the past”. Exciting, the digital historian thinks, and begins to attack the introduction of almost 100 pages. Soon, he finds out that the book deals with questions as the following: What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Hitler had defeated the Soviet Union? So the point of the book is counterfactual history and not, as expected, virtual digital history. A close look on the circumstances of the publication makes it clear: Penguin has reprinted the book that has first been published 1997 – probably because the editor has become famous. Continue reading

Qualitative Versus Quantitative Research – Visualization in the Humanities

In communicating and teaching humanities visualization become more and more important. One popular visual communication instrument are slides. More and more of them are shared on Slideshare. A very nice example is Sampling in Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Sam Ladner. The Senior Researcher at Microsoft Office shows us sampling methods and let us have a practical how-to-do. Her key themes are quantitative and qualitative assumptions in sampling, types of samplings, ethnographic and interview sampling and content analysis sampling. Continue reading

Forget it !? Memory and the formation of historical meaning in the “broad presence”

Summary of my Intervention at the Colloquium of the University of Lucerne, Zeit-Geschichte-Unterricht, 7. November 2014

Link to the original german manuscript http://bit.ly/1svdpMg

The intervention wants to make the audience familiar with questions about the current understanding of time and its consequences for history. It examines the assumption of HansUlrich Gumbrecht, according to which we live in a “broad presence”. For that, the intervention presents 4 Tableaux from which it structures the material [1] for three theses. Continue reading

Also digitally produced history needs a shop to sell its products

A contribution to the Debate about Texts and Books in the Digital Age

Production and distribution of books are expensive, which is why researchers are in need of financial support. In Switzerland, so far, researcher counted on the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which subsidizes such projects. However, the SNSF has now changed its conditions: It finances only work before printing on the condition that the texts after a certain time, for example two years, are accessible online. So, the SNSF confirms its strategic support for the #OpenAccess Strategy in the sciences. But, apparently unexpectedly for the SNSF, parts of the scientific community respond comparatively fierce and critical. The debate was also held in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ, see below) in the last weeks. Continue reading

Digital History in Zurich and elsewhere

For a Workshop about Digital History held on May 13, 2014 at the University in Zurich, reports are now available, notably on HSozKult (in German). Here an English short cut of this report by Christina Rothen:

Christina Rothen: Digital History, 13.05.2014 –14.05.2014 Zürich, in: H-Soz-Kult, 18.07.2014, <http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-5462>.

Please be aware that any changes I made to the original, including possible distortions in meaning, are solely my own responsibility.

Here an English short cut: Continue reading