History of Digital History between East and West

In histories of digital history, as in digital humanities in general, much emphasis has been placed on the two commonly recognized centers of the development of historical computing since the 1950s: the United States and Western Europe. As a result, crucial developments elsewhere have been overlooked, including in the Nordic countries as well as the Soviet Union and the various states of the Eastern bloc. The consequence of this omission is not merely a lack of knowledge about specific countries and a skewed understanding of digital history’s manifold early trajectories. It also creates epistemological blind spots regarding the political dimensions of the development of early historical computing and, given the latter’s networked nature within a general context of ‘East-West’ scholarly exchange in the Cold War period, obscures the transnational dimensions of the early history of digital history.

This workshop will address these blind spots by focusing attention on the question of how the local and the transnational intersected in the technology-inflected reshaping of historical research practices and how political backgrounds, contexts and constraints fed into this process.

The full program will be announced on this page by late September.

The workshop is jointly organised by Gerben Zaagsma (University of Luxembourg), Marek Tamm (Tallinn University), Julianne Nyhan (Technische Universität Darmstadt and University College London), Petri Paju (University of Turku), Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Stockholm University) and Nadezhda Povroznik (Technische Universität Darmstadt).

Programme

09.00

Welcome and introduction
Andreas Fickers, Marek Tamm, Gerben Zaagsma, Nadezhda Povroznik
09.30

Panel 1: Globalising Histories of Digital History

Chair: Marek Tamm
Discussant: tbc

Gerben Zaagsma
Technology and the Transnational Making of History in the Longue Durée

Marco Humbel and Andreas Vlachidis
Exploring International Knowledge Exchange During the Late and Post–Cold War Period Through Mailing List Archives
10.30

Coffee break
11.00

Panel 2: National case studies I

Chair: Julianne Nyhan
Discussant: Dinara Gagarina

Aleksey Varfolomeyev and Aleksandrs Ivanovs
From Cliometrics to “History and Computing“: Soviet School in Quantitative Methods in History

Sune Bechmann Pedersen and Freja Morris
Early Computing and the Making of Historical Knowledge in Sweden

Petri Paju
The Finnish contribution in early computer-assisted history: a meeting place between East and West?
12.30

Lunch
13.30

Panel 3: Encounters and Dialogue

Chair: Sune Bechmann Pedersen
Discussant: Ksenia Tatarchenko

Marek Tamm
Digital History in Soviet Estonia: The Transnational Network of Juhan Kahk (1960s-1980s)

Nadezhda Povroznik
“To Bare Teeth, Bite Once, but Not Gnaw”: East–Western Academic Relations in the 1970s through the Personal Archival Materials of Academician Kovalchenko

Tessa Gengnagel and Christian Schröter
Automaton and Man: Cold War Cybernetics and the Question of Collaboration between East and West Germany
15.00

Coffee break
15.30

Panel 4: Methods, Debates, and Materialities

Chair: Nadezhda Povroznik
Discussant: Aleksandrs Ivanovs

Inna Kizhner
Archaeological Computing in the Soviet Union: social networks developing formal methods in archaeological analysis

Radosław Poniat and Piotr Guzowski
Polish project of computerized family demography research 1979-1986 as an attempt to adopt the Western template to Eastern limitations

Ksenia Tatarchenko
The Omniscient Machine: A Global Spectacle of the Computerized Deciphering
17.00-18.00

Reception
19.00-22.00

Dinner for participants

09.00

Panel 5: National case studies II

Chair: Marco Humbel
Discussant: Gerben Zaagsma

Anna-Maria Sichani and Stathis Pavlopoulos
Between data and archives: Mapping trajectories of early Computational Humanities in Greece, 1960–1990

Dinara Gagarina
Digital History in Central Asia: Pioneers, Infrastructure Challenges, and Community Formation

Surabhi Baijal
Peripheral Pioneers: Tracing the Silences and Fragments of Early Digital History in Postcolonial South Asia
10.30

Coffee break
11.00
Closing round table and further steps
- Gerben Zaagsma (University of Luxembourg)
- Marek Tamm (Tallinn University)
- Julianne Nyhan (Technische Universität Darmstadt and University College London)
- Petri Paju (University of Turku)
- Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Stockholm University)
- Nadezhda Povroznik (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
12.30-14.00

Lunch and goodbyes