Session Summaries by Diana-Dias-Pereira

DH THEORY, 06.11.2024

In today’s class, we started discussing the U.S. elections. I thought this was actually a good transition to talk about the importance of fact-checking and fake news, given that the new president of the United States is experienced in this area. This discussion gave us, as students, an opportunity to express our thoughts on the whole situation.

In the second part of the class, we talked about the DH Theory and the Holocaust trial of David Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt. Prof. Düring explained the case to us, describing how David Irving had published a book about the destruction of Dresden. In his book, he falsified the victim numbers and made several claims, including that Hitler never ordered the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt responded to his publications by publishing her book Denying the Holocaust, where she argued that Irving was a dangerous spokesperson. Irving didn’t accept this criticism and took her to court. While it may seem easy to prove that the Holocaust occurred, the case illustrates that it’s more challenging than one might expect, as it requires a review of all archival documents that Irving consulted.

This example served as a transition to the third part of the class, where we discussed how to apply similar scrutiny in data-driven research. Prof. Düring gave us five steps to follow: selecting the data, modeling it, normalizing it, linking it, and, finally, classifying it. We had to apply this model on our Palladio example, I did it with my Breaking Bad example.

• I selected the characters I remembered from the entire series. Since there were many characters, I chose only the most important ones. I also used Wikipedia as a reference. The timeframe covered is six seasons.
• The modeling approach was person-to-person. Each character has attributes such as being alive, dead, involved in the drug business, or not. Each edge represents a link, specifically a relationship between characters.
• For the normalization, I decided to write the whole name of each character, as there are instances of similar names, like Walter White and Walter White Junior.
• The two main characters, Jesse Pinkman and Walter White, are linked through their involvement in the drug business.
• I classified the data by grouping relationships and levels of sympathy. This includes categories for relationships, like “related to” or “work with,” and for sympathy, such as “likes” or “doesn’t like.”

title: Session Summaries by Diana-Dias-Pereira

authors:

• dias-pereira-id date: 2024-10-30 —

European Parliament’s Archives, 30.10.2024

I. Summary of the dashboard

The dashboard is divided into 5 types of graphs containing different amounts of numbers. The first shows the total number of documents in the European Parliament archives. The second is a circular chart with the documents sorted by language. It gives us an overview and a good view of the quantity of documents we have in different languages and perhaps helps us to visualize the importance of the creation of the European Archives and which countries contributed the most, such as France, Germany, Italy, etc. The third circular graph contains the different types of documents that can be found, they’re divided into different colors and regroup categories, such as intervention orale, question écrite or proposition de resolution. The fourth bar chart groups the documents by year. Due to legislation and different policies, the EP Archives only have documents between the years 1952 and 1995. The last graph shows the number of documents by starting date, with an increasing number of documents in the early 1970s. The records are divided into seven categories: fund, series, dossier, title, long title, PE number and reference code. As I’m not an expert on the EP archives (which might influence my perception of the dashboard), I still find it a bit difficult to find the specific information you might be looking for. For example, the funds are categorized as follows: EU.HAEU/AC. I personally can’t say what kind of documents I’ll find in this fund. It would be good if there was some kind of legend or table of contents explaining what kind of information could be found in the different fonds.

II. Summary of the session

During the presentation of the European Parliament’s archives on 30 October, Ludovic Délépine and Marco Amabilino talked about how artificial intelligence and the European Parliament’s archives work hand in hand. They talked about the website and explained how we can access the different documents, for example by year or by topic. They mentioned Sparck Jones and the idea of introducing a tool that allows us to count the number of times a word appears in a document. This tool makes it possible to weight the importance of a particular word or document. They also mentioned the rules for archiving and explained why we can only consult documents from 1952 to 1995. I think it was good to have a presentation about such a tool, which can be useful for future research. However, at one point in the presentation, and especially during the discussion with experts in the field, I felt a little overwhelmed by the computer language, which I’m not so familiar with. But in general, it can be said that AI can be seen as a bridge to understanding history. As Marco Amabilino rightly said, we still have to be critical of the information given by AI and never stop analyzing and questioning the information it produces.
Words: 474

III. Questions

1) What are the dangers of AI in the European Parliament archives? 2) Is it possible to improve artificial intelligence to the point where it can conduct a critical analysis of sources, as historians do? 3) Is there any plan in the future to open archives for research students without restricting access? 4) Has a tool already been developed that can translate and transcribe the content of these documents while consulting them? 5) Is there any plan to perhaps add historical and European context to the various documents to make it easier to find the information we are looking for?

title: Session Summaries by Diana-Dias-Pereira

authors:

• dias-pereira-id date: 2024-10-23 —

Networks and Palladio,23rd of October 2024

Last week, we had a class about networks, their purposes, and how they can be useful for research. Prof. Marten Düring explained how networks work using the example of a wedding. By examining the seating arrangements of different guests and categorizing groups, we can establish links, differences, and similarities among guests, each of whom represents a node within the network. Just as with the guests, the general concept of networks operates similarly.

We were also introduced to Palladio, a platform for creating networks from an Excel table. I personally think it’s an excellent tool for historical research, regardless of the field. It can be used to map connections between people, concepts, or historical events. Tools like Palladio provide a visual representation of connections or relationships between concepts, people, events, ideas, and more. This approach offers an abstract way to visualize and categorize different kinds of information.

We students also had the opportunity to try the Palladio platform, and I used it with the show Breaking Bad to explore the relationships between different characters and how they’re linked to each other. While this example may not have historical significance, you could apply it to more important and historically relevant examples.

Maps, 16th of October 2024

In today’s class we quickly summarized the homework we had to do and discussed about the importance of maps. After finishing this, we created different groups, each one had to create a story map about a certain topic. Our group had to focus on the story map of the Olympic marathon. The main goal was to see and analyze how the map was conceived and to understand what kind of information we can collect from it. The story map in question was about the history of the Olympic marathon and which different athletes won between 1896 and 2020. The map gave us different type of information, it contained data such as: where the marathon took place, who won the marathon, where the athlete comes from or when he or she won the race. At the end of the article, we had to read was a column chart indicating the male and female winners of the Olympic marathon in times in and the same thing for from what continent the athlete was. This gives us a perception on the diversity and identities of the participating athletes.

Just by comparing the maps we can connect links between historical events and the Olympic marathon. During the Second World war and First World war for example, no Olympic marathons took place. In 1984 for example the first women participated at the Olympics. On the interactive map, they showed for example the race of the female and male winners at the same time, to show the difference of their time and pace.

One thing we could maybe reproach to this storymap is maybe the used satellite map. Even if they ran those streets back then, I think that the city didn’t look exactly like on the satellite map they used. It might be an anachronistically map to the time the race took place. We can conclude, that those kind of maps can be useful to give the public a visual representation of the track they had to run and how fast they ran marathons in time.

While looking at the story maps created by other groups, I decided to focus on the story map of John Snow. The group began with a brief introduction to John Snow. They then explained the types of information that each layer of their maps represented. Each layer contained different kind of data, such as the location of water pumps or the death toll. This serves as a good example of how GIS and the combination of different layers can provide answers to specific research questions.

title: Session Summaries by Diana-Dias-Pereira abstract: authors:

• dias-pereira-id date: 2024-10-9 —

Online newspaper archives and tool 3 impresso, 9th of October 2024

For today’s class we had to read the article of Marten Düring, Estelle Bunout and Daniele Guido that talks about the Impresso App and what kind of features it offers and how it analyzes the different newspapers. Newspapers have a bigger importance than one could think, they don’t just transmit information and news, but they also reflect society back then, on the political, social and religious aspect. By analyzing the different types of information, opportunities emerge for the researcher to focus on different aspects. While experimenting the Impresso app, the professor showed us the different filters one can apply in order to get the specific information we are looking for. The also gave us some explanations why around the 1950s the spikes stop existing, due to the copyright. Professor Düring also explained us what kind of challenges they had while developing the Impresso app, for example the recognizing of characters. Some characters in the newspapers while being scanned and analyzed resembled themselves. We tried it with the French word nucléaire. There exists a filter called add similar words, which you can see in the following screenshot taken by me. There are also incorrect written words, which allows us to find articles who talk about the same topic, this correction allows us to find similar articles about the same topic, even if the word is misspelled in the search. Claire and I tried it out with the historical personage Adolf Hitler. We put different words, like “Hitler”, “Juden”, “juifs”, “Hakenkreuz”, “KZ” and “Konzentrationslager” and tried the unigrams in order to see how often those words came up and to see the differences of how often those words appeared in a certain period of time. This kind of tool is interesting for historians to draw links between the words and their importance during a certain timeframe.

title: Session Summaries by Diana-Dias-Pereira abstract: authors:

• dias-pereira-id date: 2024-10-2 —

Webarchives, 2nd of October 2024

Last class, each group had to present either an article, a website, or how and where data is preserved and archived on the Internet. The different assignments focused on Internet Archive, what is the main problem for archiving in the web, what kind of solutions exist and what kind of tools do we have specifically in Luxembourg. Our group had to focus on the archiving of the official portal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (Luxembourg.lu) and how the website changed trough time. In order to do that, we got assigned to analyze those differences with the help of the Wayback machine. The Wayback machine is a website that collects captures of the different websites over time, in order to see the differences that occurred over time. Our group focused on comparing the first and last capture taken of the official portal of the Grand Duchy. We saw that different things had changed over time, like the layout, the different categories, and the information you could get. Over time, the website became more complete, it had pictures, articles about different topics, like tourism, economy, or social life in Luxembourg, which the portal didn’t have back in 1994. The other groups presented other web archives, like Eluxemburgensia.lu, which is a portal who has digitalized Luxembourgish newspapers, since the beginning of the Luxembourgish press. Another group had to focus on how personal archives work in the web and what kind of challenges they represent. Those assignments and texts we had to read gave me a different perspective on how the different systems or websites, like Eluxemburgensia.lu, Luxembourg.lu or the web archives in general work how they use data in general. It’s interesting to see how they process data and conserve it for other uses, like research in digital history for example and how they can be used for research. Especially in our modern and digitalized world we live, it’s important to have such tools to facilitate our research and access to different sources. Having the possibility to consult different sources online, thanks to the internet archive is a huge step in our research process because it’s less time consuming and easy to find. In my opinion Internet archives will become the future of archives, especially in times like Covid-19, Internet archives were such an important tool, because you didn’t have to leave your home to consult different sources.

title: Session Summaries by Diana-Dias-Pereira abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:

• dias-pereira-id date: 2024-09-25 —

Data, Metadata and Tool 2 Tropy, 25th of September 2024

In the last class the main topic was data and metadata and how historians can use data as a tool for their research. We watched a video which explained the difference between the two. To understand what data actually is, we took an example of a tweet on the platform X. The tweet in question gave us different information. Just by the screenshot, you could find information, like the username, the date when it got published, the exact time, who commented it, who liked it and who reposted it. Those elements represent data. Metadata is something different. In the video, they explained that metadata is data of the data, basically information of the data. We also talked about Zotero and how it can be helpful for us history students. I already knew that tool and I think it’s helpful for us students, because it allows you to put all the important information about the author, the article, etc. in one place, and depending on what citation style you want to cite, it does this work for you. It’s also useful to have all your bibliography in one storage. One negative aspect I still must mention, but it doesn’t really concern your class, is the fact that the citation style of Ons Hémecht isn’t available on Zotero, which is important especially for us history student at the University of Luxembourg, because we have to use that citation style.