The Doctoral Training Unit “Digital History and Hermeneutics”
The Doctoral Training Unit “Digital History and Hermeneutics” negotiates new forms of knowledge production in the field of digital history and humanities. The four-year interdisciplinary training programme is funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and hosted by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg.
The Team
The programme offers an experimental training environment for 13 PhD students and their supervisors and one post-doc researcher from different epistemic cultures. They include historians, philosophers, computer scientists, geographers and information and data scientists as well as experts in human-computer interaction.
What we do
The central aim of the DTU is to form a “trading zone” between these different knowledge domains in order to explore how the emergence of digital research technologies and infrastructures impacts the practices of doing historical research.
How we do it
The DTU engages with the methodological and epistemological challenges of research and teaching in digital humanities and digital history. By focusing on various case studies from different historical time periods and disciplinary fields, the PhD projects share a critical reflection on the use of digital tools and methods. Such a hermeneutic perspective opens up new approaches and opportunities in digital and public history, including digital source, algorithmic, tool and interface criticism.
Questions we ask?
How does digitisation affect the notion and role of archives? How does digitisation change the ontological status of “sources” to “data”?
What new heuristics of search are needed in the age of big data?
How can we critically reflect on the use of tools and methods in the various historical research phases, including the search, analysis and interpretation of digital data?
Which new forms of storytelling can we produce? How does the public engagement with online history lead to a new relationship between “professional” and “amateur”‘ historians?
How do digital environments enable new forms of teaching and learning?
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