TU Darmstadt Oberseminar lecture series

About: The Oberseminar is a forum for the presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art research at the crossroads of digital methods and data in the fields of Digital History and Digital Humanities. It is a weekly event from mid-October 2024 to mid-February 2025. The Oberseminar is held in a hybrid format, with TU Darmstadt students attending the lecture hall in person and other colleagues joining remotely.

International online Lecture Series “Voices Unbound? Exploring new and/or possible directions in digital and experimental oral history”

About: A lecture series co-organised by TU Darmstadt, University College London, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. We invited speakers to present work on recent technological developments that may hold promise for digital oral history. The seminar series aims to appeal to (digital) oral historians, digital humanists and scholars of the history of information, memory, and knowledge systems.

Conference “Revolutionary, disruptive, or just repeating itself? Tracing the History of Digital History”

About: In recent years, interest in the history of the digital humanities has grown. The 9^th dhiha conference at the German Historical Institute Paris from 23-25 October 2024 connects to this growing interest. It explores the overlooked history of digital history from different perspectives and emphasizes the importance of understanding the field’s past by examining historical developments, methods, and research gaps. The aim is to highlight past achievements and offer a critical perspective on the evolution of digital history, challenging the rhetoric of novelty that often surrounds it.

Keynote by Hannah Ishmael (King’s College London)

Conference Report

The Sloane Lab symposium series 2024 “Critical and creative engagement with historical data” were facilitated in collaboration with the Humanities Data Science & Methodology (HDSM) Oberseminar of TU Darmstadt, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (UCL IAS). This seminar invites international speakers whose work is situated at the intersections of collections as data, cataloguing histories and critical archival studies, heritage infrastructures, critical digital heritage, and information science.

The seminar papers explore and foreground:

• Computational approaches as means for historical inquiry, critique and creative takes on data driven research paradigms.
• The potential of digital tools and data aggregations to shed light on the geographic spread, collectors, and knowledge in historical cultural heritage collections.
• Reflections on the contested nature of museum and archival collections and the role of collections as data research in foregrounding overlooked or ignored and marginalised issues like imperialism, colonialism, slavery, loss, and destruction, that have shaped collections.
• The role of digital archives in addressing historical and present-day injustices.
• Creative approaches for virtual exhibition and collection data platforms design.

This joint virtual seminar was co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.

TU Darmstadt Oberseminar lecture series

About: The Oberseminar is a forum for the presentation and discussion of state of the art research in the fields of Digital History, Digital Humanities, Multimodal Oral History, Collections as Data and other cognate disciplines.

TU Darmstadt colleagues and students may attend in person; national and international colleagues may attend via Zoom. The Oberseminar was a weekly event from mid-October 2023 to mid-February 2024.

Sloane Lab Knowledge Exchange Event (Europe) “Connecting, co-designing and engaging with digital collections and infrastructures: challenges and case studies”

About: The event was co-organised by HDSM in cooperation with University College London, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in the UK under support by the Towards a National Collection Programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series 2023: “(Re)connecting heritage collections as data, infrastructure and participatory engagement: big dreams, big challenges”

About: The series welcomed a range of speakers interested in the intersections between collections as data, cataloguing histories and critical archival studies, heritage infrastructures, critical digital heritage, and information science. The seminar series was funded by Towards a National Collection and convened by Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL), Andrew Flinn (UCL), Nina Pearlman (UCL), Andreas Vlachidis (UCL), Jeremy Hill (British Museum), Mark Carine (Natural History Museum), James Baker (University of Southampton) and Alexandra Ortolja-Baird (University of Portsmouth).

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.

Overview of speakers and abstracts of the talks

“Multimodal Digital Oral History: The Forward-View Seminar”

About: This seminar series “Multimodal Digital Oral History: The Forward-View Seminar” was organised by the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and UCL; the Chair of Humanities Data Science und Methodology, TU Darmstadt, together with the International Centre for Archives and Records Management Research, UCL; and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

The Seminar was co-convened by Andrew Flinn, Reader in Archival Studies and Oral History, Arts and Humanities Faculty Vice-Dean for Postgraduate Research and Julianne Nyhan, Professor and Chair of Humanities Data Science, Institute for History, Technical University Darmstadt. It was co-organised by Daniele Metili Research Fellow in Advanced Data Architectures for Digital Humanities at the Sloane Lab, a Towards a National Collection discovery project and Hanna Smyth Lecturer on the Archives and Records Management programme of the Department of Information Studies, UCL

If the first “digital turn” in oral history was largely a passive affair, concerned with the online dissemination of retro-digitised and born digital oral history recordings, what might the incipient “sound as data” turn herald? What gains and losses might result from data-driven enquiries of oral history interviews as sonic or multimodal artefacts, individually or at scale? Which digital tools, processes and platforms can best be utilized in the data-driven analysis of oral history as sonic and multimodal artefact? What rationale and ethical commitments should guide processes of tool selection and creation for this work? What new research questions and trans-disciplinary collaborations may follow? And what are the implications for oral history of participating in this research, as may be illuminated through the emerging sub-field of digital hermeneutics?

Multimodal Digital Oral History engages with oral history artefacts in all their representational modalities: transcript, sound, waveform, metadata and more. These seminars will contribute to the task of imagining a Multimodal Digital Oral History turn, where the digital is active rather than passive; where digital oral history modalities are positioned as analytical categories of inquiry and also as sites of data-driven analysis; where reflexivity is a core aspect of digitally-mediated research; and as an endeavour that nevertheless remains attuned to oral history as a subjective and intersubjective meaning-making process, situated in space, time, culture and technology.

International, online Lecture series “The Digital Humanities Long View”

About: Research happens in context. But, how did Digital Humanities (DH) get here? This seminar series explores the socio-historical, -political and -cultural contexts of DH research as a means of building understanding of how we all ended up here and what that means for the future of the field. It’s an opportunity for newcomers to understand how the field has developed, and for established practitioners to consider their work as part of a larger movement with competing influences, ambitions, and blindspots. Papers may take an “insider” or “outsider” view of DH, that is, papers may be positioned within the discipline of DH or take a comparative approach that situates DH in a wider disciplinary, social, cultural and/or historical context. This seminar series was co-hosted by scholars living eight time zones apart, and therefore the times of sessions varied to allow the greatest possible access to people based at different points on the globe. It was both an experiment to push the (social) boundaries of a virtual seminar series, and a bridging of trans-Atlantic digital humanities centres who are committed to rich international discussions from a range of perspectives, with an emphasis on reflective practice. Co-hosted by UCL Centre for Digital Humanities & the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford. Convenors: Drs Giovanna Cesarani (Stanford), Adam Crymble (UCL), Julianne Nyhan (UCL), Laura Stokes (Stanford), Agnieszka Backman (Stanford).

Symposium “Early Modern Collection Catalogues: Open Questions, Digital Approaches, Future Directions” at the British Museum, UK

About: This two day workshop consisted of a first day with three workshop sessions concerning the Enlightenment Architectures project. A second day began with keynote presentations on complimentary projects in the morning, followed by an afternoon brainstorming session to discuss future directions and partnerships for the Sloane project, including potential follow on projects.

Programme Draft PDF

Workshop Reflections by Samantha Callaghan

“Symposium on Methodologies for the History of Computing in the Humanities, c.1949-1980”

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