PhD-thesis

blogposts

DH in the US: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

In the first week of June, my supervisor Andreas Fickers and I went to the US to visit several Digital Humanities centres, specifically ones working on Digital History, in Boston (MA), Lincoln (NE), and Fairfax (VA). Since the University of Luxembourg will get its own DH centre soon, we went with the goal of learning how others set up their centre, how DH is incorporated into the curriculum, and how collaboration takes place.

This blogpost is an attempt to summarise what we learned during our visit to the US. The structure I will follow is not chronologically, but by the title of John le Carré’s novel: Tinker (building and making), Tailor (specific versus generic tools), Soldier (collaborations of people), Spy (digital literacy regarding online tracking and other subjects). At the bottom of the blogpost is a numbered list of the people we met; I will refer to sources of information using these numbers.

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blogposts

Digital History as Trading Zone

Digital History signifies a transition wherein digital methods are incorporated in historical research. Digital History thus introduces techniques developed by computer scientists or engineers into the practice of historians, so that we can speak of methodological interdisciplinarity.[1]Klein, J. T. (2014). Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field (online). University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/dh.12869322.0001.001 ref-oa However, how digital methods affect the practices of History, in methodology as well as epistemology, remains unexplored. My PhD research aims to address this gap. This blogpost introduces some initial ideas and concepts that I will be investigating with an ethnographic study for which I hope to find interested historians, computer scientists, or other relevant actors of Digital History.

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References

↑1 Klein, J. T. (2014). Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field (online). University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/dh.12869322.0001.001 ref-oa
blogposts

PhD-candidate in Luxembourg!

With great excitement I can now write that I have acquired a position as PhD-candidate at the University of Luxembourg, starting November 1st, 2014. Under Prof. Dr. Andreas Fickers, Professor for Contemporary and Digital History, I will get the chance to further investigate the development and consequences of digital technology for the field of History. Of course, moving to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg with my wife is quite a step (on such short notice!). But this is a really wonderful opportunity for me to continue working embedded in the History department (as I have done at Erasmus University Rotterdam), under the supervision of Fickers who has been asking questions in recent papers and keynotes very close to my own (see e.g. the slides for his keynote „If content is king, context is its crown“ (PDF) at the AVinDH workshop I happened to have co-organized at DH2014). Fickers will be heading a Digital History Laboratory, and I will be collaborating with him to develop this lab and investigate the possibilities for the profession of History with digital tools.  Continue reading “PhD-candidate in Luxembourg!”