Session Summaries by Stefan Ignjatovic

Data, Metadata and Tropy, 25.09.2024

In the ‘Introduction to Digital History’ course on 26 September, we dealt with the topic of ‘data’ and were told exactly what ‘data’ is and what different types of ‘data’ there are. In the course, we were told that ‘data’ are (digital) things that we can create or collect, for example. The course also showed us what other types of data there are, such as ‘research data’ or ‘metadata’. The course also taught us what metadata is, if you must explain it very simply, it is data that describes other data. We also learnt about metadata from a video. This is information that describes sources such as documents or images. We also learnt why metadata is important because it helps you to organize information or knowledge. After the explanation about metadata, we saw examples of metadata to understand it better. As the last point of the course, we saw data repositories that are used to store, preserve, publish and share data, such as Zenodo, figshare or Havard Dataverse. Data repositories make it easier to access and retrieve data. We were also explained what Tropy is. This is software that is used to organize or describe photos of research material. One possible criticism of the course is that I personally missed a short introduction or explanation of the Tropy software in the course. I felt that the rest of the lessons had a good structure. I just found there was a lot of information at once and I also found it difficult to keep up with everything in the course. But I also understand that the topic of the course is a complex one.

Web archives, 02.10.2024

The class of 2 October in the Introduction to Digital History course began with us being divided into groups of three and each group choosing one of seven assignments. The seven assignments were Assignment 1 - Stakes of archiving the web, Assignment 2 - Luxembourg Web Archive, an overview, Assignment 3 - Archiving luxembourg.lu, Assignment 4 - Collection social media (You Tube) data, Assignment 5 - Fluidity of the web, Assignment 6 - Publishing family and personal archives in the web and Assignment 7 - Crowdsourced born digital archives. Assignment 5 was not chosen by any group because there were only six groups in the class. I was in the group with Charel and Andre and we chose Assignment 1, which consisted of reading the article ‘We’re losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?‘ and answering the following questions, ‘What is the main problem the article identifies?’, ‘What is the Internet Archive (IA)?’, ‘What are the solutions IA provides?’ and ‘What are the main impediments IA faces to accomplish the mission it undertook?’. Each group was given 30 minutes to complete their assignments so that they could later present their results to the other groups. The results of my assignment were that the Internet Archive preserves websites, books, etc. to prevent them from disappearing and being forgotten. Because according to the article we read, 25% of websites that were created between 2013 and 2023 have disappeared. We also found out that IA has several difficulties to realise their project, because due to cyberattacks or litigation they lose their stored websites or music etc. and they must restore the data if they are not completely lost. Since IA is not financially supported, their problems are exacerbated.

Impresso, 09.10.2024

The Introduction to Digital History course on 9 October 2024 dealt with the digital platform Impresso. In the first part of the course, we were given explanations of what Impresso is. Impresso is a digital platform that allows you to access old newspapers and to examine and analyse them. Impresso has digitised various newspapers, such as Swiss newspapers like Gazette de Lausanne or Luxembourgish newspapers like Luxemburger Wort. We were also given an insight into the various filter functions offered on Impresso and how they work. In the second part of the course, we had to do group work. In this work, each group had to deal with a filter function. I was a member of group 8, and we had the filter function ‘Text reuse’. This function is used to search for a specific term in the newspaper articles or to analyse how often this term appears in other newspapers. This function is therefore used to analyse how this term was present in certain periods and how important they were, but also to analyse how the text has developed over time. The result of our group work was that we could not find much useful information. The reason for this is that the filter function ‘Text reuse’ did not work properly. The filter did not recognise useful passages on our topic, ‘League of Nations’, it recognised numbers, special characters or only half of a word. For this reason, we didn’t get very far in our group work, but we were able to try out and test this filter function, which was also the aim of the group work.

Storymaps, 16.10.2024

In the course on 16 October 2024, we saw the ‘Storymaps’ programme. In this course, after the explanations of what maps are, we formed groups, and each group dealt with its own topic. My group’s topic was Preserving Society Hill, which was a map of a neighbourhood in Philadelphia. The task for the group was to prepare a presentation on story maps based on the given questions. My group tried to use the programme to see what was possible, but there wasn’t enough time to complete the task, so we weren’t able to finish our presentation to our liking. Another group had the John Snow Map as their theme, at the beginning of their presentation on Storymaps they explained who John Snow was. Then they put the first layer on the map, which was the map of Soho from 1854. The map dealt with the outbreak of cholera in London in the same year and the group explained what the consequences of the outbreak were. In layer 2, the group added the death toll and the larger the circle, the higher the death toll. The map should be the first step in confirming Snow’s theory. Layer 3 contains the water pumps of Soho, thus verifying the second step of Snow’s theory, which says that the spread happens via water and not via air. In layers 4 and 5 we can see that the water pump in Broadwick Street was the ‘hotspot’ for the outbreak, as there was a high death toll in the radius of the map, which can be seen on the map.

Palladio, 23.10.2024

I was not present for the course on 23.10.2024 and for this reason I did the task we were given in this course on my own at home and familiarised myself with the Palladio programme on my own. The Palladio programme allows us to visually represent the connection between different people or other things. The first step in this task was to create an Excel table in which we had to enter all the information and indicate the connection between these people. Later, we were to enter this Excel spreadsheet into the Palladio programme and the programme would process the information so that we could then choose how to visually view the connection between, for example, people in a diagram. The Palladio programme seems practical, and I could imagine that it could be very helpful for my master’s thesis. Because in my master’s thesis I also have to collect several pieces of information and find the connection between them. For this reason, I believe that Palladio can help me a lot to find the connection in the confusing information more easily and to understand it more easily. I also got on very well with the programme during the task and in general I can say that I find this programme very practical for organising and understanding large amounts of information. What I sometimes found problematic in the task was that the diagrams that visualise the connections were themselves somewhat confusing. However, I think this was because I had too much information in the Excel spreadsheet. However, I did not try to do the task with a smaller Excel spreadsheet.

EU Parliament Archives, 30.10.2024

On 30 October 2024, we attended a presentation given by the EU Parliament Archives. Ludovic Delepine and Marco Amabilino showed us what is possible with the digital archives of the European Parliament. The archives contain documents dating back to 1952. The documents can be viewed by the general public. However, only documents published between 1952 and 1994 can be viewed, due to data protection regulation that only allows documents to be made public after 30 years. The EU Parliament Archives also use an AI to analyse the documents and to find the documents you are looking for. However, at the presentation of the EU Parliament Archives, I had difficulty following the explanations due to the use of technical terms. There were simply too many technical terms, which meant that I didn’t understand everything that was explained in the presentation. The EU Parliament Archives are helpful because they have several filter functions that allow you to search for documents by year, by specific terms, in specific languages or from specific countries that can contribute to your own research. There is also the ‘Ask the EP Archives’ function, which allows us to ask an AI about a specific topic and this AI then searches for documents that match this topic. This function is also helpful for me, as I have a course that deals with the history of European integration. In this course I have to give a presentation, and I think I can find documents in the EU Parliament Archives that can serve as a source for my presentation.

DH Theory: Criticisms; Transparency; Reproducibility/Documentation, 06.11.2024

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this course and tried to understand the content of this course using the PowerPoint. The topic of this course was DH theory. In the first slide of the PowerPoint the question ‘How do we know what is true?’ was asked and on the second slide the question ‘Interpretation or Forgery?’ was also asked. I assume that they tried to find an answer to this question using the example of David Irving. It turned out that David Irving spread false information, such as Holocaust denial, and evidence was found to prove that Irving used fake sources. It was then stated on the slide that we can prove bad historical scholarship based on written records. However, the question is how we can do this for data-driven research. Then a method is presented that consists of 5 steps. The first step is selection, in which we decide which data we want to analyse. The second step is modelling, in this step we look at how we structure and present the data. The third step is normalisation, in which the data is standardised. The fourth step is called linking, in which connections are established between different data and sources. The last and fifth step is called Classification, in this step the data is classified into certain categories. Using this method, we should be able to prove that others also receive the same data or the same result as we do. If I have understood this correctly from the PowerPoint on Moodle.