{"id":7878,"date":"2019-02-22T07:07:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T06:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/digital-hermeneutics-in-history-theory-and-practice\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:11:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T09:11:23","slug":"digital-hermeneutics-in-history-theory-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/digital-hermeneutics-in-history-theory-and-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Hermeneutics in History: Theory and Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On 25-26 October 2018, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C\u00b2DH) organised the two day conference and workshop Digital Hermeneutics in History: Theory and Practice, on occasion of the official launch of the Ranke.2 teaching platform for Digital Source Criticism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

This two-day event<\/a> addressed both the theory and practice of digital hermeneutics. Day 1 had the format of a \u2018traditional\u2019 conference with sessions dedicated to the four key aspects of the concept of digital hermeneutics: source criticism, tool criticism, algorithmic criticism and interface criticism. Day 2 consisted of workshops where participants discussed the challenges of introducing digital history training in the history curriculum and demonstrated some best practices in an interactive setting.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

\nDay 1, Conference<\/h2>\n\n\n

The conference opened with a ‘Welcome and Introduction’ by C\u00b2DH director Andreas Fickers<\/strong> who pointed out today\u2019s challenges of the humanities, i.e. fast technological development versus slow appropriation of these technologies, and the need for an update of classical hermeneutics for the digital age. In this context, a set of tensions, of a methodological (quantitative\/qualitative, distant\/close reading) and epistemological (statistical\/ historical evidence, exemplary\/representative) nature, should be dealt with. Hermeneutics, and in particular digital hermeneutics, therefore becomes an art of in-betweenness<\/em>, requiring interdisciplinarity, multimodal literacy, new conceptions of curricula (train the trainers), new skills (in algorithmic, digital source, tools, interface, simulation criticism) and hands-on reflection or thinkering<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n

\nSession 1<\/h3>\n\n\n

Session 1 <\/strong>focused on methodological issues in digital hermeneutics. In his presentation, Save your sources! \u2026 but can you?<\/em>, Pascal F\u00f6hr<\/strong> (University of Basel) talked about source safeguarding<\/em>, as part of the historical critical method, which requires new infrastructures and skills. Among these infrastructure elements, F\u00f6hr mentioned trusted institutions and trusted digital repositories, retrievable objects and a trusted saving procedure. On the other hand, the new skills should imply abilities in various areas such as: information managing (searching, evaluating, selecting, processing data), media (use of all types of analogue and digital media), computer science (programming to understand algorithmic transformation), data assessment (using appropriate means, knowledge of data storage and search to be able to criticise and interpret datasets), law and archiving (copyright, data protection and privacy).<\/p>\n\n

Tim van der Heijden<\/strong> (C\u00b2DH) targeted methodological aspects from the perspective of Doing Digital History and Hermeneutics in an Interdisciplinary Setting<\/em>. The first part of the presentation centered around the \u201cDigital History & Hermeneutics\u201d Doctoral Training Unit (DTU) at the C\u00b2DH, which gathers 13 doctoral researchers of different disciplinary backgrounds. Van der Heijden highlighted the DTU\u2019s aims of critically reflecting on the impact of digital techniques on historical research as well as hands-on experimentation. The second part highlighted facets of the DTU<\/a> as a trading zone<\/em> (involving locality, interdisciplinarity, the creation of a common ground and finding an inter-language) as reflected by a series of interviews with the team members.<\/p>\n\n

The session was concluded by Marijn Koolen<\/strong> (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences – Humanities Cluster) with A hands-on approach to digital tools criticism for (self-)reflection<\/a><\/em> that addressed the question of how to incorporate methods for digital tools criticism in practice? The presentation elaborated on the results of two workshops in Digital Tools Criticism held during the DH Benelux conferences of 2017 and 2018. Among the findings were the importance of reflection<\/em> as an integrative practice, related to reflective methods (tool evaluation, evaluate bias not just error rates) as well as reflective tools (including documentation, functionalities for analysing data quality, and features for visualizing missing or erroneous data values).<\/p>\n\n\n

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