November 2022 – Digital History Berlin

28. November 202226. Januar 2023

Mikko Tolonen: Helsinki Computational History Group, High Performance Computing, and the Study of the Scottish Enlightenment

This talk aims to envision how the use of machine learning, High-Performance Computing (HPC) and data-driven approaches can become an everyday practice for historians in the not-too-distant future and change the way intellectual history is practiced. Everyone is talking about large language models such as BERT and how transformers will change the way we approach big data, but what does this mean in practice for historical research? How should historians conceptualize the use of structured and unstructured data and the interplay between them to study such phenomena as the Scottish Enlightenment?

15. November 20223. April 2023

Call for Papers für die Digital History 2023 Tagung veröffentlicht

Vom 24.-26. Mai 2023 organisieren wir hier an der Professur für Digital History für die AG Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft im Historikerverband die Tagung Digital History 2023. Dabei soll es um die Verwendung digitaler Methoden in unserem Fach gehen und die Frage, wie sie unser Fach verändern und die Art und Weise, wie wir historisches Wissen produzieren. Neben der eigentlichen Tagung sind im Rahmen einer Pre-Conference auch Workshops sowie eine Posterausstellung geplant. Mehr Informationen zur Tagung, wie man teilnehmen kann und v.a. die dazugehörigen Calls for papers/workshops/posters finden sich hier: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/digital-history-tagung-2023.

14. November 202228. November 2022

Daniil Skorinkin: People between prosecution and war: record linkage in prosopographical databases of 20th-century Russia

When it comes to 20th-century Russia, the largest prosopographical sources are centred on some of the most catastrophic events: World War II, Stalin’s terror, and, to a lesser extent, World War I. These events involved millions of people and heavy bureaucracy. Today digitisation of these sources enables computer-aided analysis of millions of life-paths with computational methods.

Russian WWII archival data has been extensively gathered and digitised by state-funded organisations, with the Russian Ministry of Defence as the main driving force. Their OBD (‘Объединенный банк данных’, Unified data bank) now includes dozens of millions of entries from war-time conscription lists, field reports, award documents, and alike.

7. November 20227. November 2022

Keynote: Danielle van den Heuvel – The Power of the Anecdotal (Data for History Lecture at the Golden Agents Conference)

On the 9th and 10th of November 2022 the Huygens Institute in collaboration with the City Archives of Amsterdam and the Data for History consortium will organize a conference to present the results of the Golden Agents project and a workshop to discuss shared challenges in extracting data from archival sources, and subsequently processing and modeling data for use in digital humanities and social sciences. A hybrid keynote on Wednesday, 9 November 2022, 3-4 pm, on the topic of “The Power of the Anecdotal” by Dr. Danielle van den Heuvel (Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and p.i. of the Freedom of the Streets project) in the context of the Data for History Lectures series concludes the conference.