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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

by Sarah Oberbichler

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 “so what?” to “what’s next?”: Joining the C²DH in Luxembourg as Visiting Researcher“ weiterlesen

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

  1. 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 []
  2. 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

  1. 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

Borders, Data and Vassals – a Postdoc-Fellowship at the DH Lab

The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named. – Gregory Bateson1

Our spatial perception of the world in which we live is undoubtedly shaped significantly by maps. Political maps, which are frequently used, convey the size and political unity of territories through colored polygons and borders. They are deeply ingrained in our collective memory. Only rarely are we unsettled in this established knowledge by alternative representation methods that encourage new perspectives on the world. The choice of the base map alone is already a significant decision with immediate visual and thus cognitive consequences: the projection of a three-dimensional sphere onto a two-dimensional surface is by no means trivial, and aside from the commonly encountered versions, numerous alternatives exist, each with their advantages and disadvantages. „Borders, Data and Vassals – a Postdoc-Fellowship at the DH Lab“ weiterlesen

  1. Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York 1979, p. 30 []

Trust, archives, and history. The IEG LivArch Workshop on documenting the ongoing war in Ukraine

by Ian Marino, Thorsten Wübbena1

During the last two days of January 2025, the IEG had the pleasure of holding an online workshop in the context of the joint project “LivArch – Documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine: The challenges of living archives for historical knowledge production”. This project, which was featured on this very blog post a few months ago, focuses on the challenges posed by Russia’s war against Ukraine, where historical records are increasingly created through digital means such as social media, mobile devices, and digital repositories. Many actors are working day and night to collect, preserve, and display records regarding this sensitive event. The workshop included the participation of many individuals who are directly involved in institutions documenting aspects of life in Ukraine during the war, as well as scholars diligently trying to understand how this archival phenomenon impacts research within the discipline of history and beyond. The aim of this blog post is to report on the workshop and share the findings and insights.

„Trust, archives, and history. The IEG LivArch Workshop on documenting the ongoing war in Ukraine“ weiterlesen

  1. According to the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), the shares in this contribution are as follows: Ian Marino (Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing), Thorsten Wübbena (Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing). []

LLM Biases: Expected and Unexpected Model Design Effects in Historical Newspaper Article Extraction on the Messina Earthquake

by Johanna Mauermann and Sarah Oberbichler

When it comes to analysing large collections of historical documents – like digitized historical newspapers – language models are incredibly powerful tools. But as these technologies become more common in humanities research, scholars also need to think critically about how they use them.

One big question researchers face when using language models for their analysis is about bias. Described by Rob Kitchin in his book „Critical Data Science,“ bias can be understood as „a consistent pattern of error within a dataset, or within a method of data processing and analysis, that skews findings and interpretation“ (Kitchin, 2024). Biases manifest in AI models on various levels: in the model design, in the data itself, in its application to contexts the model wasn’t trained for, and in the prompts themselves (compare e.g., Ferrer et al., 2021). Addressing bias questions therefore is crucial for ensuring our historical research stands up to scrutiny and Good Scientific Practice demands that we take these challenges seriously. „LLM Biases: Expected and Unexpected Model Design Effects in Historical Newspaper Article Extraction on the Messina Earthquake“ weiterlesen

Durch Projektkoordination Räume der Zusammenarbeit schaffen: Erfahrungen aus der „Digitalen Kartenwerkstatt Altes Reich“ (DigiKAR)

Ein Rückblick auf drei Jahre „Digitale Kartenwerkstatt Altes Reich“ (DigiKAR) zeigt, dass die Zusammenarbeit verschiedener Disziplinen neue Zugänge zu historischen Fragestellungen ermöglicht und innovative Forschung schafft. Zugleich ist das Projekt ein gutes Beispiel dafür, wie die Arbeit in interdisziplinären Teams in DH-Projekten eine wertvolle Kultur der Kollaboration befördert, die von Teamgeist, Transparenz von Forschungsprozessen und Mut zum Experimentieren geprägt ist. Auch wenn die Verständigung zwischen verschiedenen Fächern herausfordernd ist, sind die Lerneffekte und die Bereicherung der eigenen Perspektive durch den Austausch und das gemeinsame Arbeiten immens. In meinem Beitrag möchte ich anhand von ausgewählten Aspekten vermitteln, wie die Projektkoordination hierzu beitragen kann und diese Erfahrungen aus DigiKAR als Diskussionsansatz und Anregungen für andere interdisziplinäre Projektteams teilen. „Durch Projektkoordination Räume der Zusammenarbeit schaffen: Erfahrungen aus der „Digitalen Kartenwerkstatt Altes Reich“ (DigiKAR)“ weiterlesen

Minderheitengeschichten digital: Über den Versuch, prosopografische Daten zu nicht-weißen Menschen im Hamburger Raum aufzubereiten

von Annika Bärwald und Josefa Cassimo

Wie verwandelt man einen Datensatz voller heterogener prosopografischer Angaben in eine einfache, aber funktionale Datenbank, mit der andere Forschende weiterarbeiten können? Wie wird man in diesem Prozess historisch marginalisierten Personen gerecht, deren Lebenswege, Arbeitsverhältnisse und Mobilitätspfade meist nur fragmentarisch überliefert sind? Diese Fragen standen im Zentrum meines Versuchs, personenbezogene Forschungsdaten meines Dissertationsprojekts digital zugänglich zu machen, unterstützt durch das NFDI4Memory-Konsortium und das DH Lab des IEG Mainz. „Minderheitengeschichten digital: Über den Versuch, prosopografische Daten zu nicht-weißen Menschen im Hamburger Raum aufzubereiten“ weiterlesen

Historians and the archives of today: the LivArch project and the process of documenting the war in Ukraine

by Ian Kisil Marino

There is a dimension of historians’ work that is often overlooked when considering the nature of our profession: the archive. This reference is not to the traditional concept of the archive as merely the location where historians search for historical sources, but rather to the creation of archives. Today’s digital transformation is shaping the archives that future historians will explore. When observing a critical event of the present time, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine (2022-), it becomes evident that many actors are actively involved in documenting and archiving events of their current times – including historians. The various ways in which these archives take shape are critical to understanding what kinds of histories will be possible to write based on such digital resources. The project “LivArch – Documenting Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Challenges of Living Archives for Historical Knowledge Production” aims to explore such questions, delving into the impacts of transformation on archival practices and, simultaneously, providing an assessment of the current state of the art in emergency digital preservation. But before introducing the project, I propose to reflect a bit more on the relationship between historians and archives, which has been fundamental to our discipline since its consolidation. „Historians and the archives of today: the LivArch project and the process of documenting the war in Ukraine“ weiterlesen

Das HERMES-Datenkompetenzzentrum für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften und seine Formate am IEG

von Judit Garzón Rodríguez

In einer zunehmend digitalen Welt sind Datenkompetenzen für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften von entscheidender Bedeutung. Doch während digitale Datenkompetenzen in Disziplinen wie Informatik und Naturwissenschaften längst integraler Bestandteil der Ausbildung sind, bleibt der Zugang zu entsprechenden Schulungen in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften oft begrenzt. Und, obwohl das Bewusstsein für die Notwendigkeit digitaler Kompetenzen in diesen Disziplinen wächst, stehen Forschende häufig vor der Herausforderung, wie sie diese in ihre Arbeit zu integrieren. Um dieser Herausforderung zu begegnen, wurde das HERMES Datenkompetenzzentrum gegründet, ein vom BMBF gefördertes Projekt, das Aufbau und Weiterentwicklung von Datenkompetenzen in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften unterstützen soll. „Das HERMES-Datenkompetenzzentrum für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften und seine Formate am IEG“ weiterlesen

What You See Is What You … Have to Revise Afterwards

von Martin Prell

Daten und Zielstellung

Im Juli 2024 hatte ich dank eines FAIR-Data-Stipendiums von NFDI4Memory am DH Lab des IEG die Gelegenheit, ein Datenset zu transformieren, das wenige Jahre zuvor am Lehrstuhl für Geschlechtergeschichte der Universität Jena entstanden war: Das in der staatlichen Bücher- und Kupferstichsammlung Greiz befindliche handschriftliche Reisetagebuch zur Kavalierstour des pietistischen Grafen und späteren Fürsten Heinrich XI. Reuß-Greiz (1722–1800) in den Jahren 1740 bis 1742 war damals durch die Thüringer Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek digitalisiert und mit Hilfe der virtuellen Forschungsumgebung FuD transkribiert und annotiert worden. FuD beinhaltet unter anderem einen sogenannten WYSIWYM-XML-Editor; ein Akronym für „What you see is what you mean“, da die Eingabe der Daten in einer graphischen Oberfläche stattfindet, ohne dabei zwingend mit Auszeichnungskodierung in Berührung zu kommen. Die avisierte Präsentation des Tagebuchs im Editionenportal Thüringen war zum Ende der Erschließung nicht mehr möglich. Ziel des FAIR Data-Stipendiums war es daher, die FuD-XML-Forschungsdaten so zu transformieren und zu publizieren, dass die Edition bestmöglich auffindbar, langfristig zugänglich, interoperabel und nachnutzbar wird. „What You See Is What You … Have to Revise Afterwards“ weiterlesen