The idea that computers would help historians to produce cumulative knowledge is omnipresent in the early history of digital history. In the 1960s and 1970s, famous medievalists such as Léopold Génicot, Jean Glénisson or David Herlihy believed that these new technological devices would help in producing new type of source editions, adapted to the historiographical agenda of quantitative history and the history of mentalities. These digital research instruments would then be easily re-used by specialists across the world, and the discipline of medieval history could then make significant progress (Lejeune, 2021; Lejeune, 2024). Fifty years later, the hopes of these early adopters are far from being fulfilled, and the idea that medievalists have missed the digital turn is a commonplace in the discipline. For example, Nicolas Perreaux asserts that there is “a significant gap between the creation of databases – an activity in which medievalists excel […] – and their exploitation” (Perreaux, 2014, 190-191). In a recent interview, Alain Guerreau deplores the fact that so little use is made of statistics in the discipline (Guerreaux and Perreaux, 2021). At a discipline-wide scale, Manfred Thaller argues that the history of digital history is just repeating itself, because of the lack of knowledge about what previous generations have achieved (Thaller, 2017).
„Edgar Lejeune: Is Cumulativity of Knowledge just an Epistemological Chimera? Perspectives from the History of Digital Medieval History (1960-2020)“ weiterlesenMahsa Vafaie: National Socialist Injustice on the Semantic Web: From Archival Records to a Knowledge Graph
The project “Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts” (eng. “Reparations for National Socialist Injustice”), funded by the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF), aims to provide centralised, structured and comprehensive digital access to documents and data sources from the context of reparations for injustices committed under National Socialism in Germany. The resulting thematic portal addresses a broad and diverse range of target groups, and accordingly consists of several modules: historical-political education, an overview of the relevant file holdings, and most significantly, a knowledge graph representing archival materials, procedures and individuals involved in the reparation process.
„Mahsa Vafaie: National Socialist Injustice on the Semantic Web: From Archival Records to a Knowledge Graph“ weiterlesenPaul Bayer: Formen der Schriftsetzung in historischen Drucken als Chance und Herausforderung für geschichtswissenschaftliche NLP-Methoden am Beispiel der Baedeker-Reiseführer
Kursivdruck, Fettdruck, Gesperrtdruck, Einrückungen: In historischen Drucken sind Informationen auf vielfältige Weise kodiert und differenziert. Das Format, in denen die Buchstaben stehen, enthält Informationen, die menschliche Lesende intutitiv erkennen, welche aber im Prozess der Digitalisierung verloren gehen können.
„Paul Bayer: Formen der Schriftsetzung in historischen Drucken als Chance und Herausforderung für geschichtswissenschaftliche NLP-Methoden am Beispiel der Baedeker-Reiseführer“ weiterlesenAnica Skibba: Mapping Tourism: Wie strukturieren Baedeker-Reiseführer die räumliche Wahrnehmung Berlins? Eine Analyse mit georeferenzierten Daten am Beispiel des Jahrgangs 1921
Reiseführer bilden eine klassische Quelle innerhalb der historischen Forschung. Mit der Kommerzialisierung von Expeditionen und Tourismus im 19. Jahrhundert erlebte auch der Reiseführer eine Hochkonjunktur. Forschende des 19. Jahrhunderts schöpfen daher aus einem reichen Quellensortiment. Im beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert hob sich vor allem „der Baedeker“ als dominierender Reiseführer in Deutschland – und auch darüber hinaus – hervor. „Der Baedeker“ war das Synonym für den Reiseführer des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, schreibt David M. Bruce (vgl. Bruce 2010, S. 93).
„Anica Skibba: Mapping Tourism: Wie strukturieren Baedeker-Reiseführer die räumliche Wahrnehmung Berlins? Eine Analyse mit georeferenzierten Daten am Beispiel des Jahrgangs 1921“ weiterlesenDigital History studieren an der HU Berlin – Einladung zum Sommerschnuppern 2025
Das Sommerschnuppern geht in die vierte Runde. Wie schon in den vergangenen beiden Jahren möchte die Professur für Digital History am 19. Mai 2025, 18-20 Uhr, allen interessierten Bachelor- und Masterstudierenden in Berlin, aber auch darüber hinaus, im Rahmen einer hybriden Informationsveranstaltung den Masterschwerpunkt Digital History vorstellen und Ihnen selbstverständlich alle Ihre Fragen dazu beantworten. Herzlich eingeladen sind alle, die sich für ein Masterstudium in den Geschichtswissenschaften an der HU Berlin mit einem Schwerpunkt in der „Digital History“ interessieren. Melden Sie sich einfach über das Anmeldeformular zum Sommerschnuppern an.
„Digital History studieren an der HU Berlin – Einladung zum Sommerschnuppern 2025“ weiterlesenPreprint published: NER4all or Context is All You Need

The Chair for Digital History is happy to announce that we published our first preprint on arXiv:
Torsten Hiltmann, Martin Dröge, Nicole Dresselhaus, Till Grallert, Melanie Althage, Paul Bayer, Sophie Eckenstaler, Koray Mendi, Jascha Marijn Schmitz, Philipp Schneider, Wiebke Sczeponik, Anica Skibba, NER4all or Context is All You Need: Using LLMs for low-effort, high-performance NER on historical texts. A humanities informed approach, arXiv (4.02.2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.04351
Abstract:
Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, due to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends.
Shawn Graham: Do It Yourself Digital Golems. Experiments with various AI, neural networks, and other technologies for archaeology
The golem is a creature animated by the words in its head. Emerging from Jewish traditions, the words that did the animation had connections with divinity, but the golems themselves despite this spark of the divine toiled at mundane chores. But sometimes, the golems would get out of control, and become figures of terror. My none-too-subtle analogy is this: animated by the ‘words in their heads’, the anthropomorphized neural networks of contemporary ‘ai’ (and ‘agi’: artificial general intelligence) are similar figures, with similar connections to the divine (we are told: ‘agi’ will transcend us; ‘agi’ will bring about the singularity; ‘agi’ will make us all posthuman). In this talk, I will explore some of my experiments trying to teach these technologies ethically and critically. I will explore some of the ways I have been trying to raise my own digital golems for my mundane archaeological needs. This is a talk filled with failure and experimentation. But maybe, also, something useful.
„Shawn Graham: Do It Yourself Digital Golems. Experiments with various AI, neural networks, and other technologies for archaeology“ weiterlesenFolgert Karsdorp & Mike Kestemont: The application of unseen species models in history: correcting registration bias in nineteenth-century police reports from Brussels
Researchers of the past – whether historians, literary scholars or archaeologists – depend on the sources that have stood the test of time. That sample of history is usually far from complete, however. There are numerous reasons for this, such as natural causes (e.g., fires or floods), decisions at the level of archival policy (what do we preserve and what do we not?), and biases in the formation of the archives themselves. Data representing lower classes were long considered less relevant, for example, and thus socioeconomic factors likewise play a role in the survival of sources. In a series of recent experiments, we have explored how statistical methods from ecology can help us identify such gaps and biases in our knowledge. Those methods all find their basis in “Unseen Species Models,” which were originally developed to estimate the number of unique species in an environment. Just as ecologists try to estimate biodiversity from an incomplete sample, we apply the models to incomplete historical archives to measure the actual cultural diversity.
„Folgert Karsdorp & Mike Kestemont: The application of unseen species models in history: correcting registration bias in nineteenth-century police reports from Brussels“ weiterlesenAmanda Regan: Mapping the Gay Guides: Using Digital History to Explore LGBTQ Travel Guides, 1965 – 2005
Mapping the Gay Guides (MGG) relies on the Damron Guides, an early but longstanding travel guide aimed at gay men since the early 1960s. An LGBTQ equivalent to the African American “green books,” the Damron Guides contained lists of bars, bathhouses, cinemas, businesses, hotels, and cruising sites in every U.S. state, where gay men could find friends, companions, and sex. The online mapping project explores different dimensions of American gay life through time, from bars and nightlife, bookstores, cinemas, and churches. Users to the site are able to navigate and investigate the dynamic and sometimes disappearing nature of LGBT spaces over time.
„Amanda Regan: Mapping the Gay Guides: Using Digital History to Explore LGBTQ Travel Guides, 1965 – 2005“ weiterlesenMoritz Feichtinger: Just a Little Bit? Historicizing Born-Digital Objects
The information age is intrinsically digital. Knowledge, culture, and communication are increasingly created, transmitted, processed, and stored in digital formats. Consequently, historical inquiry, particularly when engaging with the latter half of the 20th century and beyond, must grapple with digital artifacts. These artifacts, often termed “born-digital” objects, are created by and within digital environments. Their scale, diversity, and inherent technical and cultural characteristics present distinct challenges for historical research, requiring historians to adapt established methodologies, particularly source criticism, to address these nuances.
„Moritz Feichtinger: Just a Little Bit? Historicizing Born-Digital Objects“ weiterlesen