Research

Research group “Digitality in Historical Research: Methods and Research Data”

“Digitality of historical research” is a transversal field of work at the IEG. Here, the use of digital tools and methods is trialled at the IEG in explorative and collaborative forms of work and the development of a digital hermeneutics is promoted through the integration of IT methods with basic historical principles. At the same time, the research group also has an impact on the work of the goups of “Society” and “Religion” in order to support source criticism, heuristics and analyses with digital tools and processes. The Europa forum addresses the digital transformation and the associated limitations and delimitations as a fundamental question of historical European research. A variety of formats, such as informal events, open consultation hours and individual counselling sessions, serve the exchange and further training on digital processes and tools within the IEG.

Ongoing
Aug. 2024 - July 2027
Digitalität

Forgeries X Networks

Art forgeries have been a challenge for the art business and its collecting and preserving institutions not only since the sensational case of Wolfgang Beltracchi. From the end of the 19th century, a journal called "Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes - als Manuscript für die Mitglieder gedruckt und ausgegeben" was published, in which current incidents and findings concerning forgeries and suspected cases that had come to light were published.
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Ongoing
July 2024 - June 2027
Digitalität

LivArch – Documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine: The challenges of living archives for historical knowledge production

Historians have been debating the paradox of abundance and scarcity of archives and sources since the worldwide popularization of Web 2.0. The ongoing war in Ukraine (2022-) stands out among other disruptive events in the 21st century that comprise such a paradox the most, as one can see by the emergence of new types of community-driven archives, the generation of archival material in real time, and the increased reliance on digital sources due to the inaccessibility of physical archives. Historical research on this war will rely on a multitude of digitally born sources that are being gathered and generated mostly by grassroots activities using social network posts, chats, videos, snapshots by mobile devices, or georeferenced data by satellite.
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Ongoing
Jan. 2024 - Jan. 2029
Digitalität

Artworks, iconology, cultural history: a semantic approach for interdisciplinary research

Iconology is a branch of art history focusing on studying artworks as symptoms of contemporary socio-cultural phenomena. Although the approach provides a deep art understanding, little computable data are available. The project aims at leveraging semantic web technologies to foster a quantitative approach to the branch of studies, with a focus on the relation of the artworks to their context of creation. To this end, we will provide an ontological modelling of art contextual features by extending ICON, an ontology on artistic interpretations based on Panofsky’s theory, according to which a dataset of iconological, authoritative interpretations focusing on Early Modern art will be described. The data will be further enriched with contextual information, i.e., social and cultural aspects, to foster an interdisciplinary study of the art pieces.
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Ongoing
April 2024 - March 2029
Digitalität

Transnational Flows of News: Analysis and Visualization of Historical News across Languages and Countries through Case Studies on (Return) Migration and Environmental/Natural Disasters, 1850–1950

International news networks already began to take shape between 1450 and 1650 (Raymond and Moxham, 2016; Raymond 2013). However, it wasn’t until the expansion and solidification of the telegraph industry in Europe and North America during the mid-1860s that a new era in global connectivity truly began. The establishment of global electronic communication networks quickly brought events from far-flung corners to communities around the world (Winseck and Pike 2007; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998). Those news were of course influenced by regional and national factors such as politics, culture, and economics, but also feature common narratives that transcend language boundaries (Ponomarenko 2020).
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Ongoing
Jan. 2024 - Jan. 2029
Digitalität

Kunstwerke, Ikonologie, Kulturgeschichte: ein semantischer Ansatz für die interdisziplinäre Forschung

Die Studie zielt darauf ab, verlässliche semantische Daten im Bereich der Ikonologie zu erstellen, einem Zweig der Kunstgeschichte, der sich mit dem Verständnis der tiefen Bedeutung von Kunstwerken befasst. Durch eine ontologische Modellierung der kontextuellen Merkmale von Kunstwerken werden die maßgeblichen ikonologischen Interpretationen von Kunsthistoriker:innen auf strukturierte Weise dargestellt. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, angereichert mit kontextuellen Informationen zu den Kunstwerken, um eine interdisziplinäre Untersuchung der Kunstwerke zu fördern.
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Ongoing
Jan. 2024
DigitalitätGesellschaftReligion

Learning from distant disasters? On the cross-border media coverage of natural hazards in early modern Europe

The research project examines the media coverage of natural disasters as cross-border moments of reflection and mobilisation in (Western) Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of focussing on single extreme events (with the climax of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755), as is common in historical disaster research, the project aims to show the longer-term formation and transformation of disaster discourses across territorial and linguistic borders. Printed works in German, English, French, Italian and Latin will be analysed that deal in textual and visual form with extreme natural events (earthquakes and floods) in the respective other countries or language areas. The hypothesis is that an early modern European media culture of disaster emerged through societal teleconnections produced by the media.
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Ongoing
Nov. 2023 - Nov. 2026
Digitalität

HERMES: Humanities Education in Research, Data, and Methods

HERMES, short for Humanities Education in Research Data and Methods, is a BMBF-funded joint project focussing on establishing spaces for learning, researching, and networking in the humanities and cultural sciences. The aim of HERMES is to teach, develop and critically reflect on data literacy. In pursuit of this objective, HERMES designs and develops various innovative formats.
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Ongoing
March 2023 - Feb. 2028
Digitalität

NFDI4Memory

NFDI4Memory is one of several consortia within Germany that will jointly manage the creation of a long-term and sustainable research data infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur, or “NFDI”) for the digital age. It brings together partners united by a common set of interests, needs, and aims related to the distinct challenges faced by those disciplines that use historical methods or that rely on data requiring historical contextualization.
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Completed
2023 - 2023
Digitalität

Europäische Friedensverträge der Vormoderne in Daten (FriVer+)

Dieses Projekt hat den FAIR-Prinzipien folgend die Daten auf der Webseite "Europäische Friedensverträge der Vormoderne online" transformiert. Diese Webseite stellt Informationen über insgesamt 1800 Europäische Friedensverträge aus dem Zeitraum zwischen 1400 und 1789 zur Verfügung. Die Daten umfassen Digitalisate, Metadaten, und, in einer begrenzteren Anzahl von Fällen, auch Transkriptionen und Editionen der Texte, und sind in einer relationalen Datenbank gespeichert.
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Ongoing
Nov. 2021 - Oct. 2026
Digitalität

The Construction of Political Criminality in the Courts of the Dollfuß-/Schuschnigg-Regime, 1933–38

This project examines the various constructions of political criminality at court during the Dollfuß-/Schuschnigg-Regime (1933–1938). It aims to study the transformation from democracy to autocracy. The project focuses on the different strategies for the (linguistic) construction of political criminality towards Social Democratic, Communist, and National Socialist suspects in the statements of police, prosecutors, and judges within the court proceedings.
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Completed
2021 - 2025
Digitalität

“Digitale Kartenwerkstatt Altes Reich” (DigiKAR) – Digital Map Lab Holy Roman Empire

The interdisciplinary project “Digital Map Lab Holy Roman Empire (DigiKAR)” developed and explored concepts for the collection, modelling and visualization of place-based historical information from the early modern Holy Roman Empire. It thus contributed both to historical research on the Holy Roman Empire as a space of divided and overlapping rule and to the further development of digital analysis and visualization of historical data with spatio-temporal characteristics. Movements of people, goods and ideas were not only examined and visualized in terms of their physical potential of mobility in complex spaces, but also in terms of their affiliation to different, sometimes competing, social, jurisdictional and political spaces within the empire.
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Ongoing
Jan. 2021
DigitalitätReligion

Priestly libraries in the Dutch Republic

The pilot project aims to record the bibliographic information in the inventories of two priestly libraries of the Dutch Republic of the 18th century. The scholarly significance of such libraries is well known: They show what Catholic priests who served in the Dutch mission read or at least found useful. In addition, such libraries can tell us more about Dutch Catholic spirituality in the early modern period, as well as about interest in books that did not fall within the realm of theology and pastoral care.
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Ongoing
Oct. 2019
Digitalität

ConedaKOR

The open source software ConedaKOR is an open source scientific research software. It has been used in the context of research in the humanities for over twelve years and is constantly being further developed. ConedaKOR provides archiving, management and research of image and metadata on a common web-based interface.
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Ongoing
Feb. 2019
DigitalitätReligion

“Staatskatholieken en Roomskatholieken”: The Catholic laity and the Schism in the Catholic Church in the Dutch Republic, 1650–ca.1750

This project focuses on processes of fragmentation and pluralisation within the Dutch Catholic community by examining the schism in the Catholic Church in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic from the perspective of the Catholic laity.
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Completed
2019 - 2024
Digitalität

Negotiating social relations in collective and affiliation-based networks

Social relations are usually negotiated within a collective structure. In general, actors belong to social units or take part in social events where pairwise interactions (individual to individual) are over-simplistic. Nonetheless, current historical network analysis relies greatly on this type of interaction.
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Ongoing
2011
Digitalität

DARIAH-DE at the IEG

The IEG has been involved in the national collaborative project DARIAH-DE with various areas of work since 2011. DARIAH-DE supports research in the humanities and cultural studies that works with digital methods and procedures. As a partner in DARIAH-EU, DARIAH-DE contributes to bundling and networking state-of-the-art activities in the digital humanities across Europe.
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Wissen ordnen und entgrenzen - vom analogen zum digitalen Europa?, hg. Joachim Berger, Thorsten Wübbena (2023) (IEGB 141)
Open Access
SammelbandDigitalitätGesellschaft

Wissen ordnen und entgrenzen – vom analogen zum digitalen Europa?

Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte, Mainz: Beihefte, 141
Joachim Berger (ed.)Thorsten Wübbena (ed.)
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,2023
ISBN: 978-3-525-30231-6
DOI: 10.13109/9783666302312
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DigitalitätSeminar/Masterclass/Studientag

HERMES Workshop “Data Competence for the Humanities and Cultural Studies – Working with Linked Open Data (LOD)”

03.12.2025
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