„Wenn ich mal Zeit und Ressourcen habe, würde ich das gerne noch machen“ – Manchmal endet ein Forschungsprojekt, die Arbeit ist abgegeben und benotet, der Abschluss ist da, und trotzdem bleibt da noch ein etwas übrig, das man inhaltlich gerne noch verwirklicht hätte. So ging es mir auch nach meinem Masterabschluss vor fünf Jahren. In meiner Master-Thesis „Knotenpunkt Wetzlar – Juristische Karrieren im Umfeld des Reichskammergerichts (1693-1806)“ habe ich die Verflechtungen von Karriereverläufen junger Juristen nach ihrem Universitätsabschluss untersucht und mich gefragt, welche Rolle Mobilität und strategische Auswahl von Ausbildungsstationen im 18. Jahrhundert gespielt haben. In den von mir erhobenen Daten zu den Personen sah ich über meine Masterarbeit hinaus das Potential für ein systematisches Recherchewerkzeug für weitere Untersuchungen. Meine monatelange Quellenarbeit sollte nicht auf dem USB-Stick in der Schublade verschwinden, sondern für alle Interessierten zugänglich und nutzbar sein. Doch erst als Zeit, Ressourcen und Gelegenheit zusammenkamen, konnte ich dieses Vorhaben realisieren: die Veröffentlichung der „Praktikanten-Datenbank“. „Kreuzende Wege in der kleinen Stadt – „Knotenpunkt Wetzlar“ digital“ weiterlesen
Connecting People and Place. GIS Mapping and the Democratization of Spatial Histories
Every map tells a story about the interaction between people and the world around them. Maps present aspects of the landscape that people find significant. Borders, resources, cities, the lay of the land – each element tells us a narrative about the individual cartographer and the society in which they lived. From maps, we may ascertain the needs and values of a society. In maps, we find the aspirations of those who drew or commissioned them. In this way, maps are not only tools, but displays of power and means of exercising authority. The maintenance of power through cartography has likewise been defined by access. Those with the ability to access the knowledge held in maps are both the first to be influenced by the narrative presented on the page, and the individuals best armed to enforce the map’s presentation of the spatial world. Historically, the ability to view and use maps was limited to those in positions of power, with maps often being held in books and legers, or filling the shelves of the upper strata. However, the advent of archival digitization has lifted the veil on many historic maps, providing access to wider audiences than ever before. But how can we extend this democratization of spatial knowledge and connect these maps with the spaces they depict? Moreover, how can we use them to teach modern audiences about the relationship that people had with space in the past? „Connecting People and Place. GIS Mapping and the Democratization of Spatial Histories“ weiterlesen
Bewahrende Erneuerung: Europäische Friedensverträge online
von Fabian Cremer und Thorsten Wübbena1
In der Geschichte Europas markieren die in Konflikten und Bündnissen geschlossenen Friedensverträge Grundpfeiler des heutigen Europas und gehören zum kulturellen Erbe. Die Forschung zu Friedensprozessen hat am IEG eine lange und vielfältige Tradition. Eine der wichtigsten Ressourcensammlung wurde jetzt neu aufgelegt: Die Datenbank und Online-Edition Europäische Friedensverträge der Vormoderne. An diesem Vorhaben kristallisieren sich viele Entwicklungen in den Digital Humanities der letzten zehn Jahre: Forschungsdaten, nachhaltige Infrastrukturen, digitale Editionsstandards, und der Umgang mit einem digitalen kulturellen Erbe. „Bewahrende Erneuerung: Europäische Friedensverträge online“ weiterlesen
History as a Weapon: Historical Revisionism as a Tool of Russian Psychological Aggression in Social Media
by Olesia Zvezdova
Is it possible to change the past? Not in the sense of speculative fiction, nor as an attempt to correct individual mistakes, but as a strategy aimed at securing advantage in large-scale geopolitical competition. To what extent can collective memory of historical events be instrumentalized as a weapon against political adversaries? Is it possible to rewrite the pages of history textbooks and shape a new generation that will sincerely believe in a newly constructed truth? These questions have repeatedly arisen in my research on the key mechanisms of psychological influence employed by the Russian Federation, both with regard to its domestic population and to audiences in European countries. Among the dominant narratives disseminated through Russian and pro-Russian media channels, the manipulation of historical events and historical figures occupies a central place. Therefore, during my fellowship at the IEG DH Lab, I focused my research on historical revisionism in social media as a method of Russian psychological aggression.
„History as a Weapon: Historical Revisionism as a Tool of Russian Psychological Aggression in Social Media“ weiterlesen
Sites of Memory VS Cultural Heritage: Urban Violence in Collective Narratives of Odesa Residents in Wartime
Part I. The Why and The How: Practices of Documenting Urban Violence on Odesa City
The ongoing war in Ukraine has demonstrated with particular clarity that cultural heritage and urban life are not peripheral but central targets in contemporary armed conflict. Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, systematic attacks have affected not only military infrastructure but also schools, cultural institutions, and historically significant sites. According to international monitoring frameworks, including those of UNESCO, thousands of cultural heritage locations and urban infrastructures have been damaged or destroyed. Among the most emblematic cases in Odesa is the severe damage inflicted on the Transfiguration Cathedral, alongside numerous other historically and socially significant sites.
These developments highlight an urgent need to rethink both the preservation of cultural heritage and the documentation of lived experience during wartime. „Sites of Memory VS Cultural Heritage: Urban Violence in Collective Narratives of Odesa Residents in Wartime“ weiterlesen
“The last one leaves the light on”. Static service as a key to sustainable data provision
by Moritz Schepp and Thorsten Wübbena
The headline “Everything dies, including information”, published 2022 in MIT Technology Review, still resonates today. The article states that almost every project-based third-party funded project must store its data somewhere permanently, “but there are no overarching requirements about who must store the data or how long it must be saved.” While robust solutions exist for static data publications, the challenge of sustainability still applies to living systems, such as databases developed in our DH projects. And as Huculak and Davis (2024) so simply and accurately described: “Databases need periodic upgrading, which can break entire applications.” Consequently, one principle from the “Endings Principles for Digital Longevity” is: “No dependence on server-side software: build a static website with no databases, no PHP, no Python.” Yet, principles often falter when confronted with the realities of project implementation — and justifiably so. DH research often requires active, dynamic databases to function effectively. We feel that projects should have access to the best of both worlds here. In advancing our database system “ConedaKOR”, we reconciled the functions of a living database during the project period with a minimal computing approach and a “static version” for the long-term provision.
Transforming historical street names into FAIR research data
by Orysia Vira, Ukrainian Catholic University
Street names are more than simple labels on a map ‒ they are historical documents that record the life of a city. When a street name changes abruptly or when two names coexist for the same place, these shifts reveal stories about the people who lived there and transformations that cities underwent over centuries. In medieval and early modern Lviv, a multiethnic trading hub in what is now western Ukraine, street names were recorded in Latin, German, and later Polish, reflecting the linguistic landscape of a city where Armenian merchants, Jewish craftsmen, Polish burghers, and Ruthenian communities and smaller groups representing other nations and ethnic communities (Greeks, Italians, Scots, and Welsh etc.) negotiated shared urban space.
For nearly a decade, I collected street names from Lviv’s medieval and early modern tax registers and council records, creating a database of street names covered 1382-1768 years. The data was there, carefully transcribed and analysed as part of my PhD research on the historical urbanonymy of Lviv. But how could I make this research not just accessible, but truly reusable? How could I transform years of archival work into a resource that other scholars could discover and access?
„Transforming historical street names into FAIR research data“ weiterlesen
Data ethics in historical research: Recognizing responsibility
Data may be misleadingly considered an objective and impartial product. When doing historical research based on data (re)use, applying an ethical perspective becomes essential. Data is neither neutral or objective, nor are our practices for accessing, analyzing, and documenting it. Any discourse on the production of knowledge or on technology that creates and/or manipulates knowledge implies an ethical discourse and (un)conscious decisions. Ethics imply responsibility, as ignoring ethical issues or not taking action means, in many cases, perpetuating the existing biases and inequalities. The need for scholarly exchange in order to navigate the multifaceted and complex dimensions of research ethics was also reflected in the more than 200 registrations for the conference “Data Ethics for Historical Research in a Digital Era”, about which we would like to share our thoughts in this blog post.1
„Data ethics in historical research: Recognizing responsibility“ weiterlesen
Rethinking Libraries in the Age of AI: Impressions and Takeaways from TPDL 2025
This year, the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2025) took place in Tampere, Finland, from September 23–26. I attended the conference together with Sarah Oberbichler from the DH Lab to present our joint paper, “Studying Model Design Biases in LLMs for Multilingual Historical Newspaper Extraction; The Messina Earthquake Case Study”, in which we propose an explainability-driven framework to detect and analyze biases in large language models used for multilingual historical newspaper article extraction.
Focusing on the conference’s many LLM-related contributions, this blog post explores how digital libraries are evolving under the continuous advancement of AI and what digital humanities can contribute to the field. „Rethinking Libraries in the Age of AI: Impressions and Takeaways from TPDL 2025“ weiterlesen
Learning about history in a digital world. “The Digital Logbook” as a research project and educational resource
Historical learning processes are omnipresent. They affect all age groups, forms of media, and are encouraged in both formal and non-formal education. But how do we learn to internalize and classify historical knowledge, to evaluate and contextualize it? And how can this be supported in the face of a digitalizing society facing tendencies of increasing political radicalization? My research project attempts to find answers and propose solutions to encourage data literacy and historical thinking by creating the learning platform “The Digital Logbook” and reflecting on its implications. „Learning about history in a digital world. “The Digital Logbook” as a research project and educational resource“ weiterlesen
From “so what?” to “what’s next?”: Joining the C²DH in Luxembourg as Visiting Researcher
There are critics who sometimes ask the “so what?” question when it comes to Digital History: what impact can these new methods and approaches make on historical arguments and how can they advance scholarship? Do they advance scholarship at all? To be fair, sometimes this critique is justified.
The “so what?” question has long been part of the C²DH Centre’s critical approach to digital history.
I have always admired how the C²DH Centre in Luxembourg approaches this very question. Rather than dismissing the critique, they’ve made it central to their philosophy. What makes the Centre so compelling is how they address it: they recognize that digital historians are foremost historians who face the same fundamental challenges—working with complex, incomplete, messy sources full of biases and errors, then interpreting them critically to develop arguments. But digital sources add new layers of complexity: digitization processes, algorithmic biases, complex tools. This is where new skills need to be learned (digital literacy and competence), where collaboration becomes essential, and where experimentation is key.
The C²DH Centre is a place where failure is part of success.
From Access to Ethics: Data Discussions at the DH2025 Conference in Lisbon
by Sofia Baroncini, Constanze Buyken, Judit Garzón Rodríguez, Ian Kisil Marino, Sarah Oberbichler, Cindarella Petz
The 2025 Digital Humanities Conference, held this year in Lisbon under the theme “Building Access and Accessibility: Open Science to All Citizens”, brought together a global community of researchers, developers, and practitioners to reflect on the role of openness, inclusivity, and ethics in digital scholarship. Hosted in the vibrant academic and cultural setting of Lisbon, the conference offered a rich program of keynotes, panels, workshops, and poster sessions, engaging with pressing questions around public participation, digital infrastructure, and the ethical responsibilities of working with data and digital tools in the humanities.
The conference theme built on the legacy of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and extended the conversation to contemporary challenges and opportunities surrounding Open Science. Contributions addressed a wide range of topics—from citizen humanities and inclusive digital platforms to multilingual practices, the ethics of AI, and FAIR/CARE principles—demonstrating the many ways in which the Digital Humanities community is actively shaping more equitable and transparent research practices. „From Access to Ethics: Data Discussions at the DH2025 Conference in Lisbon“ weiterlesen
Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations
by Jaap Geraerts, Henry Keazor, Demival Vasques Filho, Rebecca Welkens and Thorsten Wübbena
“Members are obliged to keep the Association’s printed matter carefully and secretly. They also undertake to return all printed matter to the Executive Board if they leave the Association and to ensure that the printed matter is returned to the Executive Board in the event of their death.”1
This clear call for secrecy and discretion can be found as a kind of prologue in issues of the so-called ‘Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes’, which were published from 1899 to 1939.2 They were distributed by the “International Association of Museum Officials in Defence Against Counterfeiting and Improper Trade Practices” (“Internationaler Verband von Museumsbeamten zur Abwehr von Fälschungen und unlauterem Geschäftsgebaren”). The project “Forgeries and Networks (ForNet) – The Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes and forgery networks in the 20th century”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), will use this valuable source to reconstruct, visualise and analyse the networks of relationships and the strategies of the actors involved at the time as well as the routes taken by the forgeries and ensure that the data compiled in the project is made available to the public. This blog post, highlights the creation of the dataset, its transformations and ingest in a graph database, and the creation of networks, as a step towards answering the project’s research questions. „Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations“ weiterlesen
- The original text reads as follows: “[…] sind die Mitglieder verpflichtet, die Drucksachen des Verbandes sorgfältig und geheim aufzubewahren. Sie verpflichten sich ferner, im Falle ihres Ausscheidens aus dem Verband die sämtlichen Drucksachen an den Vorort zurückzugeben, sowie dafür Sorge zu tragen, daß im Falle ihres Todes die Drucksachen an den Vorort zurückgegeben werden.”, example: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.35249#0070 [↩]
- Available as a digital copy at Heidelberg University Library, https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.33011, based on the collection held in the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/kunstbibliothek/home/ [↩]
Talking About Muslims in Middle French: The Potential of Word-to-Vector Models for Studying Semantic Relationships in Medieval Languages
by Kimberly Lifton
Medieval vernaculars are notoriously tricky for digital humanists to work with because they lack standardized spelling. Especially when using out-of-the-box libraries and software, most Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques simply do not work well for medieval languages. However, word-to-vector models have the capacity to handle noise like spelling variants when trained on a significant number of words. As part of my PhD project, which examines the representations of Muslims in textual sources during the rise of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, I have created custom word-to-vector models using Middle French texts. These models capture the constellations of Muslim representations in Middle French texts at the word level. My methodology considers the exploratory potential of word-to-vector models for shaping research questions in a process that Gabor Mihaly Toth has aptly described as “semantic wanderings.”1
„Talking About Muslims in Middle French: The Potential of Word-to-Vector Models for Studying Semantic Relationships in Medieval Languages“ weiterlesen
- Gabor Mihaly Toth, “Women in Early Modern Handwritten News: Random Walks and Semantic Wandering in the Medici Archive,” Journal of Digital History 3.2 (2024). https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/article/jnkqqTTKW8km [↩]
Europe Goes on Holiday: Potenziale und Herausforderungen der Aufbereitung von Daten über den Beitrag des Europäischen Parlaments zur gemeinsamen Tourismuspolitik
von Elisa Tizzoni
Kann eine schlichte Arbeitstabelle Interesse für ein bisher vernachlässigtes Thema in der europäischen Geschichte auslösen? Und kann ein Blick auf die Dokumentation des EU-Parlaments Überlegungen über die Rolle des Tourismus in unserer Gesellschaft und seine Auswirkungen auf die europäische Integration anregen?
Das sind die Herausforderungen, die ich mir gestellt habe, als ich mich um ein NFDI4Memory FAIR Data Fellowship am Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte beworben habe, um Unterstützung bei der Aufbereitung und Veröffentlichung eines Datensatzes zu erhalten, das die vom Europäischen Parlament zum Thema Tourismus im Zeitraum 1979-1999 vorgelegten Anfragen erfasst. „Europe Goes on Holiday: Potenziale und Herausforderungen der Aufbereitung von Daten über den Beitrag des Europäischen Parlaments zur gemeinsamen Tourismuspolitik“ weiterlesen