Submitted Abstract
Scientific Relevance Digital humanities are high on the agenda – also in Luxembourg. Yet one can detect a growing gap or a-synchronicity between the fast development of new digital research infrastructures and technologies and a rather slow development and implementation of digital research skills and practices in academia. In this sense, reflecting on the challenges of the digital turn is a matter of epistemological urgency. AimThis DTU aims at facing the methodological and epistemological challenges of doing research and teaching in the realm of digital humanities in general and in the field of digital history in specific. While being open in terms of thematic focus, all PhD projects share as a common denominator a critical reflection on the hermeneutic implications of the use of digital tools and technologies. This focus on methodological issues also offers opportunities to critically reflect on novel approaches in a digital and public history perspective. Pertinent questions in this perspective are: – How does digitization affect the notion and role of archives and does it change the ontological status of “sources” by turning them into “data”?- What new heuristics of search are needed in the age of big data?- What new forms of storytelling can we produce and how does the public engagement with history online lead to a renegotiation of the relationship between “professional” and “amateur” historians?- What new didactics of teaching and learning do digital environments enable? -How to implement a critical reflection on the use of tools for searching (“algorithmic criticism”), analysing (“tool criticism”) and interpreting (“digital hermeneutics”) of digital data in humanities scholarship?ImpactSeen the strategic importance that both the government and the university are attaching to digitization and digital scholarship, this DTU will engage with these priorities in an interdisciplinary yet coherent way and create a critical mass for excellent scholarship in a field of strategic importance for Luxembourg and the humanities.