Author Archives: Jan Hecker-Stampehl

What is digitization?

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I was attending an authors’ workshop in Vienna on the first days of October, a bunch of Austrian, German and French scholars are preparing an anthology on practices and perspectives on digital humanities. A stunning experience, since this was much more than your standard conference, but an internal meeting of like-minded colleagues who pursue a cultural studies perspective on the digital turn, just as I am trying to. No “proper” papers were given, it was more of an open discussion, “thinking aloud” together, exchanging thoughts, stimulating new takes on the topics discussed, challenging seemingly fixed views on the matter at hand. A very fluid process in a way and even somewhat demanding, a fact that often made me sitting silently because so many thoughts were running through my head. Plus I had a bad sleep on the one overnight stay I had, so the second day I wasn’t that lively.

I was the first to present some thoughts and I had chosen to propose a contribution on digitization “as a cultural technique” as I had called it first. Honestly, I chose the title since I thought it sounded cool, as I even admitted in my presentation. I then had chosen to change it to “digitization from a cultural studies perspective”. Now I am not even sure that is better…but the good thing was the openness that lay at the core of the workshop. So it was accepted that everyone came with unfinished thoughts, first drafts, albeit the level of elaboration differed.

I had been so naive as to have a take on digitization in a very concrete manner, namely the process of retrodigitization of archival or library material. When the discussion began, I instantly became aware of how little I had thought of the societal and broader cultural context of “digitization”. It wasn’t something I had never thought of, just when scribbling down some loose thoughts on what I would be trying to achieve with my contribution, it was all in a hurry and for the sake of having something to lean on during my performance.

The overall idea that I will maintain however, is that one should not see digitization as simply the technical process of transferring an analogue original into digital form. Instead of narrowing it down to the scanning or photographing or transcribing of the primary material, there are many steps in the process of digitization which are based on scholarly competence, intellectual resources and cultural bargaining processes about the standards and methods to be used. What’s more – what good is a digitized source when it rests unused on some server nobody knows about? So, dissemination is one of the key elements of anchoring the digitized material among the users.

We’ve been given scarce time to work out our contributions for mutual commenting among the authors. Sitting here, trying to elaborate the initial thoughts I had, I am sitting with my notes from the discussion and I notice how demanding it is to come up with a 20-page explanation of what digitization actually is. I am assuring myself that there is neither a possibility nor even a necessity to believe it has to – or even can be – exhaustive.

Back again…

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Seems like an unforgivably long time in the blogosphere since I last posted something here. Reasons? I could name a few. Keeping up the first scholarly blog I started requires some effort, and that one hasn’t been overtly active in the past few weeks…

One of my recent thoughts was also: “Who the heck is going to read what I write about my research in English?” But, since I will be presenting some thoughts at a workshop on scholarly blogging in Vienna in November, and the host mentioned this blog in my short CV, I thought “I can’t let this one lay waste”. So, I’ve actually decided to take up more regular posting here.

Vienna calling…reflections on my research stay part 1

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I am writing this piece from the library at the Department of History, University of Vienna. I am staying here for the whole of March in order to do some research and writing. Well, it was a somewhat absurd procedure that got me here: I applied for the scholarship last autumn. Humboldt University Berlin and Vienna University had concluded a new bilateral co-operation treaty (outside of Erasmus, a framework of its own so to speak), and it immediately struck me that a great colleague and sponsor of digital history is located (t)here. So I contaced Professor Wolfgang Schmale, whose name I’d already known as a student from his works on European identity construction. He has been writing on and practicing digital history for quite a while now, doing a lot of e-learning projects, databases with historical sources and endorsing a cultural studies approach to digital humanities that met my interest.

So, after I’d gotten a positive answer from him to host me, I handed in my papers at Humboldt U, and…nothing much happened. I remained patient, but asked again in January how things are with my application. Our responsible co-ordinator only left for Vienna to “negotiate” on things at the end of January. Again, I asked if I can seriously start planning my trip to Austria. “Things look good, but it’s not definitive yet…” – ooomph. What should I do? I didn’t really have a clue what I should make out of this strange situation. I kept ringing different people in Berlin and Vienna, until, finally, on the evening of February 20th (!) I got the green light for my research stay. Yay!

What followed, was a nerve-wracking, turbulent 1,5 weeks during which I booked a flight, secured a place to stay (thanks to the Austrian Exchange Service!) and made the final arrangements to leave. That said, I can’t thank my family enough because my mother-in-law readily stepped in to help my wife taking care of our three children. Phew, now I am here and one week has already gone! During which I not only got acquainted with the surroundings and the university, plus my friendly host Professor Schmale who gave a warm welcome. I also attended an interesting workshop, dealing with continent allegories in the early modern period (a project including an impressive database) and finished an article on strategies for digitizing the Norwegian cultural heritage! So far, it’s been very fruitful and I’m already fearing that I won’t get enough time to see the city…

More’s to come towards the end of my stay here.

Breaking the silence…

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Phew, after a good start, I had to succumb to

  • the weekly stress that teaching brings with it, especially when giving a full-fledged lecture in front of ca. 100 first-term students for the first time
  • my struggle between maintaining the group blog I’m already running (NordicHistoryBlog)
  • the pressure of constantly having to write in order to justify running a second blog
  • lack of ideas what to write about

So, now I’m finally up and writing my first post in half a year. Shame on me! But I’ll promise to keep the good pieces coming.

The digital challenge to historical research

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I’m sitting on the train going home to Berlin. I spent the day in the city of Braunschweig, somewhere in the middle of Germany, attending the opening conference of a new working group which has been set up within the German Historical Association. The working group is called “Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft”, i.e. digital history, and has been founded last year at the biannual gathering of German historians, the Historikertag. Its aims are, well, there’s the first point: some initial aims have been identified, but as the whole field of digital humanities and digital history, also this initiative still needs to define more precisely what it actually is going to deal with. I don’t claim that the arrangers of the conference and the working group’s steering committee were clueless. It’s just a fact that, way too often, we simply declare that the digital turn is happening, but we seem to find it hard to leave the meta-level discussion and to go hands-on.

One of the things that struck me was how differently we look at the digital turn in historical research. Some of us have been dealing with the changes at hand for some time, some have only begun to. Some are hard bloggin’ scientists, some are sceptical, some interested. Of course that’s only stating the obvious.  Just because one might accept and support the changes that the digital turn is bringing about, one does not necessarily need to embrace it. However, why do we – at least that was the case at this one-day event – still talk about the digital as if it had just started to happen?

The initiative to establish an own working group within Germany’s largest professional association within the humanities has to be welcomed, there’s no doubt. After having staid passive, partially even hostile, vis-a-vis the digital turn, many historians in the German-speaking countries have opened up towards it. The adoption of digital history, be it blogging and tweeting or using advanced digital computing tools in their research, is happening all the more in a vehement manner. It’s almost like the oft-cited pebble that has been thrown into the water, and now the water circles are spreading.

So, on one hand: how good that this step has been taken. On the other hand: why is there still so much scepticism even amongst those who mean to wave the flag of digital history? Shouldn’t we be more daring and trust more in the added value we will gain from applying digital methods to historical research and teaching? Shouldn’t we be more self-confident and offensive in demanding the chairs, post-doc positions and scholarships dedicated explicitly to DH to be established? Only with a self-confident attitude and a well heard voice will we be able to pave the way for digital history and digital humanities to become more of a self-understood branch within history as a discipline.

To quote Phil Collins (what?!), “we still have a long long way to go” (always easy to say, by the way). The steps we have to take next, however, need to be way larger, at least that’s the impression I was left with.

Acquiring the taste

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I borrowed the title of this blog post from the title of the second album by the British 1970s progressive rock band Gentle Giant (which gives you a hint about my musical preferences, by the way!). Somehow the headline sprang to my head when I thought how I could describe the process I’m currently in. I have been sketching up my project for more than a year now, have done a lot of reading and conceptualising. With the blog going online, of course I feel myself under a stronger pressure to write about the actual aims of my study, about the contents and projected scope.

Yet I feel almost as if I still have to, well: acquire the taste. What does my project actually “taste” like? Is it spicy enough, does it stimulate my own senses enough, or have I added too much salt? Is it OK to actually only present the recipe instead of simply saying, here’s the finished meal? What kind of toppings will I add to the dessert? A double espresso or a double Dimple afterwards?

Acquiring the taste: I think I still have to work on the menu. I have a rough idea of the case studies that will be the parts out of which the whole is going to be created. I still have to find out if it’s going to be a four-course or a five-course dinner. For some courses I have an idea about the ingredients, but not how I should cook them. Not to speak of the seasonings which, of course, I can only add at the end.

But I think, it’s going to be delicious and pleasantly surprising, that’s what I am sure of.

What is “digital history”? vol. 2

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When entering the digital humanities / digital history discourse, not being an ICT / IT specialist, I felt rather unsure about my position. In fact, I still do. Attending a DH workshop at my home university which the department of art history had arranged, I was fascinated with the topics the speakers were presenting, but had the distinct feeling of understanding only half of what they said. As in all disciplines or research environments, there is an own DH jargon which I was not aware of until then (I’m still not, until date!). People all of a sudden seemed to make deeply philosophical statements when pointing to “ontologies”.

I’ve managed to learn about some of the concepts and technologies behind these terms, a lot of which remain unintelligible to me all the same. But I haven’t started to adopt text-encoding or image-processing. So far, I am not sure what technology I will need to answer my research questions. It could be that data mining comes into question when examining the use of e.g. the social media by cultural and scholarly institutions. So while my fascination with what you can achieve by using digital technologies in the humanities is ever growing, I’ve gone through some trouble if it were legitimate to position myself within the context of digital humanities.

When I visited a meeting of Berlin based digital humanists for the first time (I’ll actually have to attend the meetings more often!), I admitted my uncertainty if what I am dealing with is “digital humanities proper”. The prompt answer from an American colleague came as a relief to me: “There is no digital humanities proper!”

As a matter of fact, who would be setting the boundaries, anyway? Isn’t the whole field of digital humanities and thus also digital history yet to take shape? And even if it continues to do so, should we wish for clear demarcations of what DH should be “allowed” to be? What can we agree upon? What should be the minimum requirement for a project/scholar/institution to be part of DH? I think these questions will keep us thinking for a while…

What is “digital history”? vol. 1

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Dealing with history and the web does make one think about what “digital history” actually is. I usually point to this term when explaining what my project is about. But the term is as vague as it could be. Looking to the context of digital humanities doesn’t seem to help that much either. For that reason I thought it might be worthwhile to repeatedly (I deliberately avoided the term “regularly” 😉 ) reflect upon this concept here on the blog, thus contributing to how the term could be understood and which facets might be added to its understanding.

I consider my project to be “DH”, referring to both digital history and digital humanities. Looking at the history of this field of study, you will usually find the genealogists pointing to humanities computing as the most prominent forefather. Today I read the concise and quite instructive introduction that Frédéric Clavert and Serge Noiret wrote for their their co-edited anthology Contemporary History in the Digital Age, which was published recently. According to them, the genesis of digital history can be traced along the lines of information and communication technologies (ICT) finding their way into historical research. Their perspective is mainly a technological one: historians incorporating digital tools into their research become digital historians. But when it comes to the impact the web has on history, other aspects come into play: “We are faced, above all, with new ways of reporting history and, in contemporary history, with new forms of identity representation and memory construction.”1

The Swiss specialist for history didactics Marko Demantowsky claimed, in an article currently online for an open peer review (the text is in German), that we cannot talk of an independent discipline called “digital history”. He also denounced the digital humanities to not be very aptly named thus. Something like a “digital history” could not be epistemologically justified – as far as I understand it, he is pointing to the fact, that the nature of the discipline doesn’t become “digital”, that the framework of historical methodology and theory, the questions we have to pose to the source material etc. doesn’t change in principal. It’s rather the digital (in his case especially: learning) environment that does change. The access to and communication about historical knowledge changes, but not the way of doing historical research.

I am not quite sure about that. We do need a new understanding of “doing history” in the digital age, yet the problem is, that few seem to address the topic at hand in detail. I’ve read numerous claims about how our attitudes have to and will change, that this is going to be a watershed in the history of historiography. But I haven’t really seen this being fleshed out, or at least I haven’t found authors exploring this beyond such general statements. That is one of the motivations behind this project: to try to understand how the change is happening in practice.

  1. Frédéric Clavert/Serge Noire: “Introduction. Digital Humanities and History. A New Field for Historians in the Digital Age.” In:  Frédéric Clavert/Serge Noire (eds.): L’histoire Contemporaine à L’ère Numérique. Contemporary History in the Digital Age. Brussels 2013, pp. 15–26, here: p. 24. [↩]

Blogging in English

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I opted for English as my working language on this blog. Not being a native speaker, I am aware that my use of the English language might have some shortcomings. I recently discussed the issue with a colleague and we agreed that it is hard or even impossible to reach the same degree of precision and detail when not writing in your mother tongue (which is German in my case). However, I felt that considering the scope of the topic and the public I would like to reach, English would be the right choice. Since English is so ubiquitous as the academic world’s lingua franca, of course one gets used to reading and communicating a lot in this language. Besides, a lot of the literature on the field I want to study and write about in the blog is in English. Several of my case studies and samples will be taken from the UK and the USA. Finally, I hope that using English will enable me to create a worldwide network of people with similar interests, thus creating a larger pool of knowledge to profit from and to contribute to myself.

Even though I have some trust in my verbal skills in English, I know I’m not perfect and that my way of putting things is perhaps not always apt and 100 % correct. Thus, I will be thankful for linguistic advice or corrections.