Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG)

Jaap Geraerts

By Jaap Geraerts  Two weeks ago, from March 29 until April 2, the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference took place in Dublin. It’s probably the largest conference for academics interested in the early modern period and it customarily attracts scholars from various historical disciplines and fields from all over the world.

RSA 2022 in Dublin

Sofia Baroncini

by Sofia Baroncini

 Once upon a time…

My story starts with curiosity. During my master’s thesis in Visual Arts at the University of Bologna, I could choose some courses from a long list. Among them, I noticed one course entitled “Digital Humanities”, taught by Professor Francesca Tomasi.

Once upon a time, I crossed Digital Art History

Constanze Buyken

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.

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

DH Lab

von Meike Starke und Catharina Strokowsky  Die Arbeit mit uneindeutigen Daten lässt auch technische Lösungen irgendwann an ihre Grenzen stoßen.

4230 Zeilen unter dem Datenmeer: Nutzung von OpenRefine zur Datenbereinigung bei uneindeutigen Datensätzen in DigiKAR

by Jaap Geraerts and Teresa Wendel  In a previous blog post that appeared almost three years ago (tempus fugit!), I introduced a small (pilot) project on priests’ libraries from the early modern Dutch Republic. Since then, a lot has happened – in general, but also in relation to this project.

Priests’ libraries – Part 2: making our data operable

Fabian Cremer

von Fabian Cremer, Cindarella Petz, Teresa Wendel und Thorsten Wübbena  Seit der Genese der Digital Humanities wird in der Community um das methodische und kulturelle Selbstverständnis gerungen, unter anderem durch die Formulierung gemeinsamer Werte und die Formierung institutioneller Verankerung.

Die Werte der Digital Humanities in ihren Institutionen

von Lara Beringer  Häufig laufen Lehrveranstaltungen nach einem bestimmten Schema ab: Die Themen der Seminare und einzelnen Sitzungen stehen bereits fest, während des Semesters werden von den Dozent:innen vorab ausgewählte Quellen und Literatur gelesen und vorbereitet, meist hält man ein Referat, eine Sitzungsleitung o. Ä., um seine aktive Teilnahme zu erlangen und am Ende des Semesters schreibt man eine Hausarbeit, die nach der Lektüre durch

Wie Historiker:innen arbeiten. Einblicke in die Projektlehre im DigiKAR-Projektseminar

a guest post by Mariam Gambashidze,Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig Conferences are exciting scientific events, especially if they are held in person after the long pandemic times.

EuroCarto 2022 – presenting DigiKAR to the international cartographic community

By Ian Marino  How will historians tell the history of the COVID-19 pandemic? At first, they will do so based on historical sources, as always. But how is the vast number of vestiges of such a global and traumatic event being archived?

Digital archives of the COVID-19 pandemic: research notes

Cindarella Petz

by Cindarella Petz Let us resume our dive into the history of historical network research! In this (three-part series) post, I first recounted the history of computational thought in historical research, and next I will discuss networks for history, before highlighting some of the cornerstones of network methodologies in historical studies.

 1

This is part 2 on the development of network research.

A (not so) short history of historical network research &#8211; part 2

by Daniela Linkevicius de Andrade  Time is a strange thing for historians. It is our object of adoration and frustration, our compass and clock. We study time, but when it comes to the time of our own lives, things get more complicated. Over the last weeks, I’ve constantly heard from other historians: “wow, time went by so fast!”. As a historian, I should know that time is subjective, but I never cease to marvel.

A journey through time and networks: a short story from a PhD candidate at the DH Lab

von Fabian Cremer und Thorsten Wübbena Bis zum Jahr 2022 hatte das Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG)

 keine

Leitlinie zum Umgang mit Forschungsdaten am Institut. Eine solche Leitlinie bildet einen zentralen Baustein für die strategische und operative Entwicklung von Maßnahmen im Forschungsdatenmanagement.

Durch Partizipation zum Kontrakt. Gestaltungsprozesse einer praxisbezogenen Forschungsdatenleitlinie

Demival Vasques Filho

by Daniela Linkevicius de Andrade and Demival Vasques Filho  Writing history in the 21st century means considering the digital space as a significant space for the production of historical knowledge, especially since dichotomies such as “offline” and “online” fail to do justice to how “real” and “digital” intertwine.

Diving into Reddit: authority networks in history forums

Monika Barget

By Monika Barget In the winter term 2020/2021, Jaap Geraerts and I worked with students in the Mainz MA programme “Digitale Methoden in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften” (“Digital Methods in the Humanities and Cultural Studies”) to create a digital edition of early modern birth and apprenticeship letters.

Geohumanities III: analysing early modern mobility through birth and apprenticeship letters

Markus Müller

by Markus Müller with the collaboration of Melina Ramirez

 Introduction

Since the 1980s, our knowledge on 16th century censorship has been growing constantly thanks to coordinated research projects and new sources. In over ten years of research, for instance, José Maria Bujanda and his team edited all printed catalogues of forbidden books issued by Catholic authorities in the 16th century (eleven volumes until 1999).

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode I: OCR with Latin prints

Before digital humanists can do things with data, they first need to collect them, and

 web automation

(or more specific methods of

 web scraping

) can be a quick way of gathering a large amount of data.

Doing Digital History with Python IV: web automation

by Markus Müller  In the last episode, we built a pipeline to convert a diplomatic transcription into normalized Latin text. The code works fine as long as the diplomatic transcription is correct. But what happens if the transcription contains errors or, even worse, if the printer in the 16th century misspelled a word? – Right now, nothing would happen at the moment because our pipeline cannot detect these errors.

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode IV: Detecting OCR transcription errors

by Markus Müller  Visiting a museum as a kid, I sometimes wondered why I could hardly read anything in the medieval or early modern books and manuscripts displayed in the exhibition. Even after I learned Latin in school, the situation did not improve. I was not aware that people in former centuries used a lot more abbreviations than today, especially in Latin texts.

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode III: Normalizing 16th century raw text

By Jaap Geraerts and Sarah Büttner  The scholarly importance of “Priesterbibliotheken” (priests’ libraries) is well-known: they provide insight into what Catholic priests serving in the Holland Mission read or at least thought useful to own. Moreover, such libraries can tell us more about early modern Dutch Catholic spirituality, but also about the wider interest in books outside the remit of theology and pastoral care.

Priests’ libraries in the Dutch Republic

Sarah Büttner

by Sarah Büttner  In times of covid-19, virtual workshops can be quite hard for organizers as well as for participants. On the other hand, they offer a unique opportunity to try unconventional methods to improve the situation for both sides.

Exploring connections: Digital workshop on Network Analysis with Python

Sofie Sonnenstatter

by Sofie Sonnenstatter In January, the DH Lab launched its series of (online) events “60 Minutes of DH” with a webinar on the automatic transcription tool

 eScriptorium

. The monthly events, planned as one-hour long afternoon sessions, are mainly intended for academic staff at the IEG and focus on joint discussions of tools, methods and literature from the field of Digital Humanities, as well as insights into the international project

60 Minutes of DH: eScriptorium for Handwritten Text Recognition in Humanities Research

by Monika Barget  Als Ergänzung zur Einführung in die Erstellung von GeoJSON-Dateien beschäftigt sich der heutige Blogbeitrag mit der Visualisierung dieser Geodaten im Open Source Geoinformationssystem QGIS. Das Tutorial führt Schritt-für-Schritt durch die Erstellung einer einfachen Karte und gibt Hinweise auf weiterführende Lernressourcen.

Geohumanities II: Gestaltung und Druck einfacher Karten in QGIS

by Monika Barget In the second edition of

 Doing digital history with Python

, I would like to address word clouds as a visual method of finding patterns in texts (see critical reflection in Basic Text Mining: Word Clouds, their Limitations, and Moving Beyond Them). Word clouds display the frequency or importance of individual keywords in individual texts or entire corpora.

Doing Digital History with Python II: creating custom Word Clouds

by Monika Barget  Für viele Geisteswissenschaftler:innen und Mitarbeiter:innen in der Forschungskommunikation sind Karten methodische Werkzeuge, um räumliche Beziehungen und Entwicklungen zu analysieren und zu vermitteln.

Geohumanities I: Ortsdaten mit Geojson.io erfassen und bearbeiten

Präambel: Dieser Text ist ein kollektives Dokument, das keine zuordenbare Autorschaft hat. Die Entstehungsgeschichte dieses Textes geht zurück auf eine Lehrveranstaltung im Sommersemester 2020 zu Projektmanagement in den Digital Humanities im Masterstudiengang „Digitale Methodik in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften“ an der JGU und Hochschule Mainz.

Managementbedarf in Forschungsprojekten der Digital Humanities

by Jaap Geraerts  Prior to taking up my current position at the IEG, I was based at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) at University College London where I served as the postdoctoral fellow on the digital humanities project “The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe” (AOR). An international collaboration between CELL, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University, the project team, consisting of historians, computer

The Archaeology of Reading, COVID-19, and online teaching

Thorsten Wübbena

Von Fabian Cremer und Thorsten Wübbena tl;dr   Der DARIAH-DE-Workshop zu ConedaKOR – einem graphbasierten Datenbanksystem zur Verwaltung und Präsentation von Objektsammlungen – führte neben neuen Entwicklungen der schnittstellenstarken und modular aufgebauten Software über die Anwendungsfälle in der Kunstgeschichte und Maya-Forschung zu grundsätzlichen Fragen in der Software- und Infrastrukturentwicklung für die Forschung: 1. Komplexe Software

ConedaKOR-as-a-Service. Über Kontext, Komplexität und Komplikationen

by Isabelle Tanja Reiß  Last winter I had the pleasure of working at IEG Mainz for ten weeks. This internship was part of my master programme in Digital Humanities at JGU Mainz. My task was to rework the board game “engage!” created by Monika Barget, Jack Kavanagh, Susan Schreibman, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Sharon M. Leon in 2018.

Redesigning the “engage!” board game – my public humanities internship

Sarah Oberbichler

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.

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

by Sophia Renz and Vanessa Tissen The beginning   It all started with the seminar on network analysis in the summer semester of 2020. After learning about the basics of network theory and building networks in Python ourselves, the teachers Aline Deicke and Demival Vasques Filho asked us students to work in groups to develop a project combining our individual humanities backgrounds with network analysis.

LinkedArt: exploring network analysis in art history

Annika Bärwald

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?

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

Ian Marino

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.

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

von Felix Bach und Cristian Secco  Die Transformation von digitalisierten Druckwerken von einer Bilddatei zur maschinenlesbaren XML-Datei ist für zahlreiche Methoden der Digital Humanities ein wichtiger Schritt in der Datenaufbereitung.

Text zu XML mit Python auf Basis des „Bomber’s Baedeker“

Martin Prell

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

What You See Is What You &#8230; Have to Revise Afterwards

by Monika Barget  In April 2020, we started a series of case studies to introduce researchers working with historical sources to data analysis and data visualisation with Python. Today’s blog post covers topic modelling with the Python packages Gensim, spaCy, NLTK and SciKit learn.

Doing Digital History with Python III: topic modelling with Gensim, spaCy, NTLK and SciKit learn

Over the years, the DH Lab has been working towards establishing a veritable tradition of going on a retreat every so often. Yet due to epidemics, conflicting agendas, or simply the lack of time, we haven’t been able to do so annually.

Smells like team spirit – DH Lab retreat 2024

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.

Sven Dittmar

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.

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

by Tetiana Shyshkina  Autumn, in my mind, is like a beautiful story about the end of the year. It’s a time when things start to cool down and nature gets ready to rest. Starting in August, the leaves slowly change from green to gold and copper. At the same time, German stores fill up with Christmas treats and decorations. It’s as if they’re quietly saying that the peaceful autumn is just the beginning of something special and bright.

Autumn Beginnings: My New DH-Season at the IEG in Mainz

A How-to have fun with DH on the road by generating 3D models from photos using Structure From Motion Photogrammetry
 

by Sarah Lang The Digital Humanities have such a huge inventory of digital methods that it is pretty hard to keep up with the learning of new methods while working with others just recently learned.

DH fun on the road: 3D models from your photos using photogrammetry

by Cindarella Petz Buckle up for a dive into the history of historical network research! In this (three-part series) post, I will recount the history of computational thought in historical research, discuss networks for history, and highlight some of the cornerstones of network methodologies in historical studies.

 1

Prepare for part 1 on computational thought in the historical studies.

A (not so) short history of historical network research &#8211; part 1

by Demival Vasques Filho  Last September, as part of our seminar series, “60 minutes of DH”, at the IEG, I presented an introduction to historical (social) network analysis. In the talk, I gave an overview of the field’s history, discussing landmark papers, in my opinion.

Introduction to historical (social) network analysis – Part I

by Markus Müller In 1550, the Catholic cathedral preacher Johann Wild (Ioannes Ferus, 1495–1554) admitted in the preface to his commentary on the Gospel of John that he reused texts of Protestant authors such as Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) and Johannes Oekolampad (1482–1531) in his book, but that he only borrowed thoughts that were compatible with Catholic teaching.

 1

Unfortunately, in his text, there are no footnotes or other

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode VI: Finding text re-use

von Fabian Cremer, Swantje Dogunke, Thorsten Wübbena

 1. Motivation

Die „DH from Scratch“-Veranstaltungen markieren auf den Tagungen des Verbandes „Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum“ aktuelle Diskussions- und Handlungsfelder, die sich aus der Koordination digitaler Forschung ergeben.

„Experiment, Ergebnis, Erkenntnis“ – Dokumentation einer Interviewreihe zu Projektmanagement in den Digital Humanities

by Monika Barget Recently, I have more extensively explored

 serious games for teaching and research communication in the humanities

. In a workshop aimed primarily at religious studies scholars, I intended to address analogue board games as well as hybrid and exclusively digital games. And apart from games I myself had used or contributed to, I hoped to present other examples in different languages.

Games for the humanities / religious studies &#8211; scarce or simply hard to find?

by Demival Vasques Filho  I just returned from Japan, where I attended the NetSciX (the Winter edition of NetSci) conference. It was an enjoyable event, with inspiring presentations and discussions. Here, I will share with you some of my perceptions about it!  It seems that the humanities still have a low presence in conferences on network science.

IEG DH Lab at NetSciX 2020

by Fabian Cremer  This September, an online workshop on the publication of research data in the fields of History, which we offered for the first time, exceeded our expectations. The overwhelming interest, the engaging participants and the smooth flow of the event led us to a better understanding and (three) notable thoughts we would like to share.

Calling for data publication workshops in historical research

by Markus Müller  We have come a long way since episode I of this miniseries: After digitizing the texts, normalizing the orthographic variants, and resolving the abbreviations, we used an interactive web app to find and correct remaining transcription errors. Now that the texts are free of mistakes we can finally use them for comparisons. In this episode, we will compare an original text with an expurged reprint to find censorship.

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode V: How did the censors actually change the text?

Von Teresa Wendel  Jede und jeder von uns trifft sie mehrfach am Tag ­— eine Entscheidung. Unabhängig davon, ob es sich um alltägliche oder lebensverändernde Fragen handelt, jede Entscheidung erfordert sorgfältige Überlegungen. Bei der Planung eines bevorstehenden Projekts treten ähnliche Herausforderungen auf: Aufkommende Fragen gilt es, gut abzuwägen und sorgfältig zu überdenken, um die richtige Entscheidung für das eigene Projekt zu treffen.

Die Kunst der Entscheidung: Erfahrungen aus einem Praxisprojekt

von Fabian Cremer, Swantje Dogunke, Jonathan Geiger, Anja Gerber, Anna Maria Neubert, Julian Schulz, Thorsten Wübbena  „Interdisziplinäre Wissensproduktion innerhalb der digitalen geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung benötigt verschiedene Planungs-, Koordinierungs- und Steuerungselemente, um eine erfolgreiche Zusammenarbeit zu ermöglichen.“ Diese These, aus dem Selbstverständnis und der Forschungspraxis der Digital Humanities

Projektmanagement in den Digital Humanities &#8211; World Café auf der DHd 2022

by Demival Vasques Filho  In the first part of this blog post, we discussed the first studies in graph theory and social network analysis. Then, we introduced several concepts: random networks, weak ties, two-mode networks, centrality measures, the focus theory, network visualization, and structural holes. Now, let us move on to some applications and yet new concepts!

Introduction to historical (social) network analysis – Part 2

by Ian Marino, Thorsten Wübbena

 1

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

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

Talking about the weather used to be an innocent topic suitable for small talk. These days, this became a political issue, the existence of snow being populistically framed in order to negate climate change, completely misrepresenting its processes.

Seasons of Green DH and Thirsty Computing

by Sofie Sonnenstatter  The IEG is involved in RESILIENCE, a research infrastructure project for Religious Studies and related disciplines, involving twelve partner institutions from ten European countries.

RESILIENCE – A Research Infrastructure for Religious Studies

Anna Aschauer

by Anna Aschauer  The IEG and our DH Lab is involved in ReIReS, a joint project building infrastructure on religious studies, about which my colleague Jaap Geraerts already wrote here.

The Use and Study of Special Documents (ReIReS-School)

by Monika Barget  During our DH brownbag lunches at the IEG, colleagues have repeatedly asked us if we could recommend Python packages for digital history. We have therefore set up a list of packages we at the IEG DH Lab are using for the analysis of text (stored, for instance, in XML/TEI or JSON formats), the modelling of historical networks, or the creation of interactive maps.

Doing Digital History with Python I: reading (messy) XML &amp; JSON data

And if so, how? Where to start a network research project?

“Should I do network analysis?” – Reflections on the Barcelona Past Networks Summer School 2024

Elisa Tizzoni

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?

Europe Goes on Holiday: Potenziale und Herausforderungen der Aufbereitung von Daten über den Beitrag des Europäischen Parlaments zur gemeinsamen Tourismuspolitik

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.

Talking About Muslims in Middle French: The Potential of Word-to-Vector Models for Studying Semantic Relationships in Medieval Languages

by Jaap Geraerts, Henry Keazor, Demival Vasques Filho, Rebecca Welkens and Thorsten Wübbena 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.

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They were distributed by the “International Association of Museum Officials in Defence Against Counterfeiting and Improper Trade Practices” (“Internationaler

Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations

von Fabian Cremer, Michael Czolkoß-Hettwer und Thorsten Wübbena  Ein Workshop zum Forschungsdatenmanagement ist derzeit zwar keine exotische Weiterbildung mehr, aber als fachspezifisches Angebot in der Geschichtswissenschaft weder üblich noch obligatorisch. Die Landschaft der Angebote zeigt trotzdem eine Vielzahl an engagierten Akteur:innen mit ausgewisesener Expertise.

Differenzieren, Bündeln, Verstetigen – Weiterbildungskonzepte zum Forschungsdatenmanagement in der Geschichtswissenschaft

by Sarah Büttner  Große Ziele alleine anzugehen ist ein oftmals unmögliches Unterfangen. Daher war es nicht nur eine, sondern gleich drei Universitäten, die sich der Aufgabe widmeten, den Zweck und die Möglichkeiten von Forschungsdatenmanagement an ein breites Publikum heranzutragen.

Über den Umgang mit digitalen Forschungsdaten: Virtueller Forschungsdatentag der RMU 2020

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, … „From Access to Ethics: Data Discussions at the

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.

From Access to Ethics: Data Discussions at the DH2025 Conference in Lisbon

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.

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. I have always admired how the C²DH Centre in Luxembourg approaches this very question.

From &#8220;so what?&#8221; to &#8220;what&#8217;s next?&#8221;: Joining the C²DH in Luxembourg as Visiting Researcher

by Cindarella Petz Finally, we have arrived at a comfortable depth after recounting the history of computational thought in historical research (part 1) and the development of network research (part 2).

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It is time now to delve into networks in history in part 3 of this series!

A (not so) short history of historical network research &#8211; part 3

by Fabian Cremer and Thorsten Wübbena  Newly established DH Labs in research institutions often find themselves in a field of tension – of simultaneous and contradictory expectations, goals and missions.

The DH Lab as a living oxymoron

ein Gastbeitrag von Ingo Frank (IOS Regensburg)  Ausgehend von der konzeptuellen bzw. letztlich ontologischen Frage ‚Was ist eigentlich ein Ort (im frühneuzeitlichen Alten Reich)?‘ und der damit einhergehenden konzeptuellen Modellierung mit den begrifflichen Unterscheidungen haben wir uns bei der Planung des DigiKAR-Projekts für eine Ontologie-basierte Datenmodellierung entschieden.

Ontologie-Entwurfsmuster zur Modellierung raumkonstitutierender Attribute frühneuzeitlicher Orte in der Digitalen Kartenwerkstatt Altes Reich (DigiKAR)

Judit Garzón Rodríguez

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.

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

by Sarah Oberbichler  Digitized historical newspapers have been a crucial source for my research over the past decade. Exactly ten years ago, in 2014, I began my research journey with historical newspapers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Large-Scale Research with Historical Newspapers: A Turning Point through Generative AI

At the beginning of March, I went to New Zealand for a research visit with a planned duration of four weeks. This visit was part of a collaboration involving the IEG DH Lab and Te Pūnaha Matatini, a New Zealand centre of research excellence for complex systems and data science hosted by the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics.

Research visit in New Zealand: Modelling the spread of COVID-19 on higher-order networks

by Markus Müller  In the first episode of this miniseries, I explained how to use OCR with Transkribus to create a diplomatic transcription from images of 16th century Latin prints. However, the resulting text is full of abbreviations and may contain transcription errors. In both cases, Python scripts could help to normalize the text and to detect possible errors.

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode II: Let Python speak to Transkribus

By Agata Bloch and Demival Vasques Filho  After a couple of attempts, we have finally received the exciting news that our project has been recommended for funding by the Polish National Science Center! Over the next four years, we will study the communication patterns of imperial commoners (non-elite actors) who developed similar characteristics, narratives, and thought strategies in different areas of the vast Atlantic Portuguese Empire.

Imperial Commoners in Brazil and West Africa (1640–1822): A Global History from a Correspondence Network Perspective

A small project called Europäische Friedensverträge der Vormoderne in Daten (FriVer+) ran at the DH Lab in 2023. The main aim of this project was to transform the data that had been gathered during an earlier project, Europäische Friedensverträge der Vormoderne online, and that was stored in an SQL-database, into XML and make it publicly available. All of this was done in accordance with the FAIR principles.

Competing demands: on combining different activities during my Postdoc

von Merle-Sophie Thoma und Teresa Wendel  Praxiserfahrungen spielen schon lange eine Rolle beim Übergang von Ausbildung zu beruflichem Alltag.

Vom Kaffeeholen zur Meisterbarista: Praxiserfahrung in den Digital Humanities

by Ian Marino and Demival Vasques Filho Being part of a DH Lab involves questioning what constitutes this type of organism: who we are, what we do, how and why we do it. A recent workshop at the Digital Humanities Lab of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa has sparked a reflection regarding the question that entitles this blog post.

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The multiple nationalities and institutions of the researchers present there added ingredients that

What is a Digital History Lab? Reflections from a trip to Lisbon

by Ian Marino  “My IEG fellowship experience can be summed up as a great place to learn languages.” Emphasizing “languages” in the title of my digital humanities fellowship report may seem unusual. Yet, it has been the word resonating most during my 8-month stay in Mainz.

by Ian Marino Emphasizing “languages” in the title of my digital humanities fellowship report may seem unusual. Yet, it has been the word resonating most during my 8-month stay in Mainz. My IEG fellowship experience can be summed up as

 a great place to learn languages

. Let me explain.

On Learning Languages (a DH Fellowship Report)

by Jaap Geraerts  There’s a wonderful phrase in Dutch: “het nuttige met het aangename verenigen,” which means something like “to unite that which is useful (nuttig) with that which is pleasant (aangenaam).”  Although in general academia tends to be firmly tilted towards the former, occasionally it does happen that the coveted combination of utility and pleasantness is achieved.

Workshop in Villa Vigoni

by Jaap Geraerts  In September 2019, so in pre-pandemic times, several (former) members of the IEG DH Lab went on a retreat to Kloster Jakobsberg for a couple of days. The main goal of this retreat was to discuss the individual research projects and to discover overlap between them and encourage cooperation within the frame of the DH Lab.

DH Lab Retreat 2022: Delving into goals, tasks and values

a guest post by Till Grallert  A recent Twitter post from my former colleague Anne Klammt made me aware of a recent relaunch of “Zeitschriftendatenbank” (ZDB), the portal for periodical holdings in German (and Austrian) libraries. Part of the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB), the website looks great and provides a lot of data-driven functionality, such as maps and timelines of holdings.

Integrating library data into an authority file: The challenges of MARC XML and inconsistent transcription practices

by Jaap Geraerts  Since I started my project on the schism in the Catholic Church in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic in the summer of 2019, I have been creating a dataset that comprises the information contained in lists of baptisms, burials, and marriages. This information enables me to trace the movement of Catholics to another, competing Catholic Church in the context of the schism.

Dealing with uncertainty and capturing the underrepresented

By Alessandro Grazi  My adventure in the world of the Digital Humanities, which started about a year ago in Innsbruck, continued last October and November with a Python course for beginners offered by the Codingschule Düsseldorf. I did not know what to expect that Autumn Wednesday evening, when at 6 pm I connected to the Zoom link of the Python course I was going to attend.

„Hello, World!“: a Python course for beginners with the Codingschule Düsseldorf

von Thorsten Wübbena [Kontext] Vor ungefähr drei Monaten fand die DHd 2020 „Spielräume: Digital Humanities zwischen Modellierung und Interpretation“ in Paderborn statt und wie jedes Jahr brachte auch diese DHd-Tagung nicht nur Einblicke in aktuelle Forschungsfragen, sondern versammelte eine Community und schaffte Gelegenheiten für Diskussionen.

von Thorsten Wübbena

 
 [Kontext]
 

Vor ungefähr drei Monaten fand die DHd 2020 „Spielräume: Digital Humanities zwischen Modellierung und Interpretation“ in Paderborn statt und wie jedes Jahr brachte auch diese DHd-Tagung nicht nur Einblicke in aktuelle Forschungsfragen, sondern versammelte eine Community und schaffte Gelegenheiten für Diskussionen.

ORCIDgraph

by Jaap Geraerts  COVID-19 has posed a challenge, to put it mildly, to how most of us go about living our lives. Either in our personal life or work life, most if not all of us had to make significant adaptions in order to deal with a world that still is in the grasp of pandemic. The experience I’d like to focus on in this blog post, is that of doing research at these unprecedented times.

Research in times of COVID

By Alessandro Grazi  It was a cold, sunny, winter morning, and just like every other morning I was standing on a platform of Giessen’s train station. But this time I wasn’t headed to the IEG in Mainz, where I work, but to Innsbruck, Austria. No, the anticipation I felt wasn’t for an exciting skiing weekend on the Austrian Alps (I can’t ski, anyway!), but for the Transkribus User Conference 2020.

Initial familiarity with Transkribus: The User Conference 2020

by Jaap Geraerts  The IEG is one of the twelve partners of the Horizon2020 project “Religious Infrastructure on Religious Studies”, mostly known by its acronym “ReIReS“. Within this project, one of the main responsibilities of the IEG is the organisation of the various training sessions such DH workshops and training schools that take place at each of the partner institutions.

DH Lab

Redesigning the “engage!” board game – my public humanities internship

ConedaKOR-as-a-Service. Über Kontext, Komplexität und Komplikationen

ReIReS meetings in Paris

IEG DH Lab at NetSciX 2020