Max Kemman, Author at Max Kemman

Digital History

Book publication! Trading Zones of Digital History

I am excited to announce that my book on the trading zones of digital history has been published by De Gruyter and the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History. As the first volume of the Digital History and Hermeneutics series, this book lays the theoretical as well as empirical groundwork for analysis digital history and its contributions to the historical profession. The book is open access and can be read here.

dhbenelux

DHBenelux 2020 submissions

This week the seventh DHBenelux conference will take place. This time it will technically not be in Belgium, the Netherlands, or Luxembourg, but online. It was scheduled to take place in Leiden, the Netherlands, but due to Covid-19 Leiden will host the conference in 2021 instead. In this post, I analyse the submissions, acceptances, authors, and abstracts. For the previous years see my other posts in the “dhbenelux” category.

Digital History

New paper! State of the Field: Digital History

Today the journal History published the paper State of the Field: Digital History to which I had the pleasure to contribute together with Annemieke Romein, Julie Birkholz, James Baker, Michel de Gruijter, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Thorsten Ries, Ruben Ros, and Stef Scagliola. In this paper we provide an overview of the current state of technologies and practices for data generation, analysis, and reflection for historical research. We hope the paper will provide a valuable introduction to historians and students interested in digital methods for historical research, with plenty of references for further exploration of the topic. The paper is available open access here.

PhD-thesis

Book contract with De Gruyter

I am very excited to announce that I have signed a contract with De Gruyter to publish my PhD thesis as a book. The book will appear in the upcoming series Digital History and Hermeneutics (edited by Andreas Fickers).

papers

Book review: Ian Milligan – History in the Age of Abundance?

For the journal of Internet Histories I had the pleasure of reading Ian Milligan’s recent book History in the age of abundance? How the web is transforming historical research (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). In this book, Milligan discusses the necessity of studying the web for historical research, as well as the problem this introduces with respect to abundance. In my review, I focus on how for Milligan this abundance is both a promise as a pitfall for historians. You can read the review in the journal here, or read my self-archived copy below.

dhbenelux

Paper publication: Boundary Practices of Digital Humanities Collaborations

I am really happy that today the first paper based on my PhD research was published in the DH Benelux Journal. This new journal will serve to turn select conference abstracts from the annual conference into full papers. The first volume follows last year’s conference theme Integrating Digital Humanities. My paper critically explores the integration of the humanities and the computational domains, and concludes that the digital humanities may be more heavily oriented towards the humanities than a balancing of the digital and the humanities, limiting the ability of DH to emerge as a ‘third space’ in-between the humanities and computational domains. You can find the volume here, including my paper in HTML and in PDF.

dhbenelux

DHBenelux 2019 submissions

Next week will feature the sixth installment of the DHBenelux conference, moving to Belgium, to be held in the city of Liège. In this post, I will analyse the submissions, authors, and abstracts, and look to the future of the community. For the previous years see my other posts in the “dhbenelux” category.

Digital History

Thesis abstract: Trading Zones of Digital History

On Friday 26 April 2019 I will defend my PhD thesis at the University of Luxembourg.

blogposts

DH Failures vs Findings

Recent discussions in digital humanities have drawn attention to “failure”. Projects can fail to deliver a tool or fail to innovate practices. But what practices are emphasised by speaking of “failure”, and for whom is a certain result a failure? In this post, I argue that recent discussions of failure seem to take DH as software development rather than research, shaping the discussion of what DH should achieve and whether other results are thereby failures.

collaborative DH

Collaborations as Trading Zones

DH is clearly a meeting of different communities. To better understand DH therefore requires the investigation of this ‘meeting’. A concept that has gained in popularity to describe the meeting between different communities is trading zones, which I will elaborate in this post. Using this concept, differences and commonalities between meetings of DH collaborations can be investigated and mapped.