Making shell companies visible. Digital history as a tool to unveil global networks and local infrastructures (LETTERBOX)

Letterboxes have become a symbol for the Luxembourg financial centre in the national and international press. A material object of daily life and at first sight ‘innocent’, the evocation of the letterbox in the context of the Luxembourg financial centre bears a double meaning. It refers on the one hand to a mass phenomenon – the creation of tens of thousands of shell companies and their physical manifestation as letterboxes – and on the other hand to the opacity and emptiness of these structures – with actors that are not immediately visible and with companies that do not give rise to any real economic activity.
The LETTERBOX project is based on the hypothesis that thanks to the power of digital history methods at the level of data enrichment and visualisation, this largely hidden infrastructure of the Luxembourgish financial place will become visible and therefore allow us to renew the national and international historiography.
LETTERBOX explores the idea of creating an active trading zone between history and digital technologies – in particular computer science and interface design as well as natural language processing (NLP) – to cope with the abundance of (unstructured) data and the challenge to develop a common perspective to build and interrogate these datasets.
LETTERBOX intends to open the black box of shell companies. The heuristic power of digital history allows us to crack open a strategy of concealment that is consubstantial of the shell companies. If moments of crisis – like financial scandals – make critical infrastructures visible for snapshots, LETTERBOX will be able offer a continuous view in a historical perspective.