070057 PS BA-Proseminar - Public History - Introduction to Computational Approaches (2022W)

Digital revolution in the humanities and social sciences has opened new possibilities for research on human societies, culture and history on a much larger scale. Large and openly available digital collections of different types of data, ranging from texts, music, and films, to artefacts in museum collections, historical documents, and archaeological records have made historical archives more accessible to the researchers and opened new possibilities for dissemination. The development of new computational tools and mathematical models or adaptation of methods from natural sciences has enabled historians to tackle some long-standing questions in a novel way and inspired them to ask new ones. However, although new digital power has helped to make research faster, cheaper, and in many cases more accurate, supported transdisciplinary collaboration and made history more available to the public, it has also brought new challenges and opened discussions on relevance, limits, and ethics of digital history.

Over the course of this proseminar, students will be introduced to a variety of digital approaches in historical sciences, from analysis and data management to publication and dissemination. We will discuss the opportunities and challenges of digitized historical archives, the use of computational models in historical research, and central issues in digital public history. Our weekly discussions will be based on the assigned reading of relevant scientific articles and book chapters. In order to prepare for the discussion, students will be required to write a short report each week, analysing the methodological approaches and theoretical background of the text and comment on its relevance to broader questions in historical research.

The combination of weekly written assignments in the form of critical analysis of scientific articles, active contribution to group and plenary discussions, and peer-review exercises will allow attendees to actively engage with the texts and current debates as well as to develop their research and presentation skills.