A Digital History Lab at the University of Zurich?

The University of Zurich is developing a Digital Society Initiative (DSI) to engage with the impact of digital technology that should be studied historically. Monika Dommann, Martin Dusinberre and Gesine Krüger therefore plan to establish a History Lab within this Initiative. They argue that digital history should have to play a key role there because Big Data, surveillance, privacy, access rights and the circulation of cultural artefacts and other digitally mediated social interaction demand a deep historical understanding. Find here a short cut of the concept.

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Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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JSTOR Lab Text Analyzer – A Summary and a Short Test

JSTOR Labs has developped a new application: http://www.jstor.org/analyze/. It analyzes a text that you upload on the JSTOR-Lab-Site by detecting and priorizing terms, and suggests related documents.

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Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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Local report

A edition project of the Swiss Literary Archives, the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) and the Swiss National Science Foundation

Hermann Burger (1942-1989) wrote his first novel between 1970 and 1972. It remained unpublished until recently. The manuscript is kept in Swiss Literary Archives.

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Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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New Book: Reading Historicial Sources in the Digital Age

bild-reading-historical-sources-in-the-digital-ageClose reading or Distant reading: A new book of proceedings entitled “Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age” («Lire des sources historiques à l’ère numérique») has just been published. The contributions of this volume base on selected papers presented at the conference of the University of Luxembourg held in 2013.

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Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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/

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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.

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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.

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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.

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Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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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

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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Humanities, Texts, Books, Digital Age — The controversy in Switzerland

The Swiss National Science Foundation wants research results freely available on the internet and links the promotion of scientific research closely to this requirement. Does this Open Access Strategy mean that the culture of the book is threatened in Switzerland? A petition in the internet calls for more money for publishers in the  humanities and more freedom for the  authors. Meanwhile, more than four thousand people have signed it. Continue reading

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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We need Digital Texts — Data that can be processed: About NLP for Historical Texts

Historical texts are more often available in digital form. Digitization should preserve cultural heritage and make documents accessible. Such projects increasingly strive to create digital text—data, that can be searched and processed. Together with the increasing availability of digital historical texts, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to them. Specific linguistic properties of historical texts—the lack of standardized orthography in particular—pose special challenges. Michael Piotrowski’s book gives an introduction to NLP and deals with such problems for historical texts. Continue reading

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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Big Data in History

Patrick Manning, Big Data in History, London 2013

The author, Patrick Manning, is Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh. He pursues a big goal: As a Director of the Center for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) he wants to develop and build up a world wide historical archive, thinking that time has come to create a coherent record of human social change. He compares his project to those in climate modeling and genetic databases. The small book is an introduction into the project of the CHIA, that exists since 2007. Continue reading

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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