Claire Foeteler

title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: authors:

• foeteler-id date: 2024-11-06 —

[Summary of the eigth session], [06.11.2024]

The session started with a discussion about the United States presidential election for presidency from 2024-2028. Most of the students shared their opinion on this topic, but I do not share everyone’s opinions, and some comments were in my opinion not right. We talked about Trumps “qualities” of talking and how he has the capabilities to manipulate people because he makes promises that he will not keep. We also talked about Kamala Harris and how some comments that were made by Republicans were sexist and illogical. After this discussion, we started to talk about DH Theory. The professor started to session with the person of David Irving and how he used sources that way he needed them and started to twist the information. He was severely criticised by various historians such as Deborah Lipstadt in her book “Denying the Holocaust”. Irving didn’t accept this criticism and took her and the editor to court to sue them. To defend themselves, they had to Another aspect of this session was again our project that we did with Palladio. We had to revisit our analysis project and focus on 5 steps of Selection, modelling, normalization, linking and classification. I worked on this together with Diana and we worked it out together and applied those 5 steps on our individual projects on Palladio. Here are the notes that I took:

• Selection: chose the main characters that were there for more than one episode, I selected the most important for myself, sources from the watching of the series and some research on Wikipedia for basic knowledge, complete names and different seasons
• Modelling: the nodes are people, person to person, edges: the work and the relationship status,
• Normalization: only first names, first letter all caps
• Linking: work, living situation and relationship status
• Classification: related, worked with, in a relationship, dated, knows each other, friends and another was about sympathy, likes doesn’t like and neutral, professional and personal

title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:

• foeteler-id date: 2024-10-30 —

[Summary of the seventh session], [30.10.2024]

title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:

• foeteler-id date: 2024-10-23 —

[Summary of the sixth session], [23.10.2024]

This session was held by Marten Düring. As a preparation for the class, we had to read an article written by him that explained Palladio and an introduction of a text. In addition, we should experiment a bit with Palladio to make us familiarized. I thought the text about Palladio was rather difficult and I had some struggles to really understand the system and make sense to new terms such as nodes and alteri. However, the explanation that was given to us to better understand how Palladio works was very logical, and it made complete sense. Marten Düring explained the system of networks and their purposes to us with the example of a wedding. The network we used, was the seating arrangements of a wedding with the different tables for the guest. The tables were established based on different factors such as relationship status, age and language to show links, similarities and differences between guests. Those represented a node in a network. This shows the different structures and networks of communication and how they can differ and change overtime. After the more theoretical part, we could ourselves “play” and work with Palladio with a subject of our choice. I choose my family and friends to create such a network representation. We worked with Excel and later pasted our data into Palladio to visualize connections between people, ideas and concepts. A phrase that stuck with me and that I will keep in mind for further works is: Any subject that you study can be shown into a graph. A graph can simplify a highly complex and large topic and represent it without the added difficulty of a text.

title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:

• foeteler-id date: 2024-10-16 —

[Summary of the fifth session], [16.10.2024]

This session was held by Eliane Schmid and for this class we had to read and analyse an article and write a short reflexion on it. The class started by discussing our homework and brought even more forward the importance of maps. Then we got an introduction in the topic of maps and on different tools and apps that can be used to create a map. Later, we were divided into groups and had to work on a specific project. My group had to work on the story map of the Olympic marathon over the years. The article showed the different marathon routes from 1896 to 2020 and showed the names of the winners, the time they ran and a text that describe the race, the winner and the conditions. The maps were interactive, and one could project oneself into the different marathons. But the maps give away more information than just the marathons. During the first and second World Wars, no Olympic marathon took place, so no map, and in 1984, the first woman ran the first female Olympic marathon. Even if, those story maps were very well structured and interesting, they can also be critiqued. The use of satellite maps seems a bit anachronistic since the cities like Paris, have evolved during the years. The other groups had to focus on different topics that were still related to maps. One group had the John Snow map is constructed by different layers that each represent different data like the number of deaths and the locations of cholera. By separating or by adding all the layers, new data can arise and provide answers.

title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:

• foeteler-id date: 2024-10-09 —

[Summary of the fourth session], [09.10.2024]

This session was about the topic of Impresso and held by Marten Düring. As a preparation for the session, we had to read an article written by Marten Düring, Estelle Bunout and Daniele Guido. The text is about the Impresso App, the features that come with it and the different methods of analysing newspapers. This is an important tool for historians because newspaper are a source that does not only transmit information, but it also reflects a specific time. In a newspaper, one can find many different aspects of society such as political, environmental, economical and historical aspects. With gathering all those information, a historian can paint a very realistic picture of the past. While working with Impresso, you can use filters to separate information, explore different perspectives and focus on specific aspects. During class, the professor demonstrated how to use Impresso and explained different scenarios like spikes in data and the background why it is that way. Marten Düring also mentioned the challenges of the app, because of scanning difficulties and struggles with character recognition. However, we could also play and discover Impresso on our own in groups. We chose to work with the unigram and focused on words such as “Hitler”, “Konzentrationslager”, “Juden”, “Hakenkreuz” and “KZ”. The diagram that was shown to us, linked to those words, made it clear and visual when those terms were frequently used and how it evolved over the years, especially during the years of the second World War.

[Summary of the third session], [02.10.2024]

This session was structured differently than the last one. In the beginning we were told the program of the session and that there would be an election for the student representative for the MAHEC. After this, Madame Papastamkou gave us an explanation of the following group work that had to be done in class. We had to form groups and chose a topic to work on for around 30 minutes to be able to present it to the class afterward. My group chose the third assignment surrounding the archiving of the website “Luxembourg.lu”. I found this very interesting because we could actively familiarize ourselves with a new topic. I have never worked with an internet archive and the Wayback machine was also a new tool for me. During our group work, we could see the evolution of this page over the years, and we could recognize some important changes. In comparison from the first capture to the most recent one, we could see that it looked way more modern, and the colours of the national flag are omnipresent. You also have the possibilities to change the language and the whole site is filled with information for tourists. In addition, the viewer of the website can also enlarge his knowledge about the Luxembourgish history but also get to know our traditions and culture. With the Wayback machine my group could analyse different statistics and could see various diagrams based on data. Overall, I liked this session, because we could work on something hands on and understand the importance and the frequency of data and metadata. I will include the Internet archive in my research for different projects, because I think it is something very special and I think it is important to see how things evolve over the years. Words: 297

title: Session Summaries by Claire Foeteler abstract: ‘Bla bla bla’ authors:

• foeteler-id date: 2024-09-25 —

Summary of the second session, [25.09.2024]

During this session, held by Madame Sofia Papastamkou, we mainly learned about the topic of data and metadata. The teacher showed us the differences between those two terms and how we can find data and use it for our advantage. We were also shown different examples to visualize and better understand this complex topic with a photo on Flickr and even a Tweet. An interesting question that the teacher asked was if we, the students, had used data for our work. Another thing that we learned about was the New York public library and their web archives. I thought this was very interesting and nice to know for the future. For me personally, this session was hard to understand and hard to follow because I’m not very into that specific topic of data and metadata. There was a lot of new information to understand and digest, which I found difficult to do. In addition, I found it rather sad that the introduction to Tropy was very short and just done in the last few minutes of the lesson. This should become a tool to use in the future because it seems to have a lot of perks that can favour our research for the Master thesis, for example. I thought the session should have been structured differently. I am a learning-by-doing kind of student, so I would prefer that we would go through the practical stuff together in class and get some at home reading on the more theoretical parts of the course.

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