Blog

In reading up on various topics to prepare my lectures for a digital history course I am currently teaching I am struck by the extent to which a dichotomy is created between supposedly new ‚digital’ ways of doing history versus traditional, or if you will analog, historical practices. Whether the focus is on data as a new type of source, digital methods to analyze it, new forms of academic publishing or calls to change our narrative way of writing in order to better integrate and explicate our methodology, the suggestion is invariably that we face a fundamental break with past practices.

This week I started teaching on a new course entitled Digital Historical Research. The course is offered to employees of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies from february-july 2013. It is organized by myself and my NIOD colleague Hinke Piersma. I am teaching several of the classes and will upload the slides to my slideshare account. The course website (in Dutch) can be found here. 

[This is an English translation of a short report on the digital history workshop held on 7 January 2013 at the Huygens ING, as it appeared on the Dutch website Historici.nl. Full disclosure: I did not only write this report but also organized the workshop and gave the introductory lecture. More information on the workshop, including the slides of many presentations, biographies of the speakers and abstracts of the papers (several of them in English) can be found on the website: www.digitale-geschiedenis.nl.]

On 7 January 2013, the Royal Netherlands Historical Society (KNHG) and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences) organized a workshop on the theme of digital history. The aim of this well-attended workshop was to discuss the methodological and epistemological changes that are brought about in historical research as a result of new technologies and the availability of digitized sources. With discussants for every paper, and about 50 participants in total, time was clearly too short to deal with all questions that came to the fore.

Wayne State University Press has recently published a new book entitled Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture.

A small update to my previous post on the composition BOTWIN, a musical commemoration of Polish-Jewish participation in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

The Centro de Música Contemporánea Garaikideak has recently uploaded the complete work here on youtube: 

In 2008 I completed my Ph.D. thesis on Jewish volunteers who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. My thesis centered to a large extent around the Naftali Botwin company that consisted mostly of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews (see my publications list to download some related articles).

Last April I was contacted by a young Spanish composer named Ignacio Fernandez Galindo. Working with several musicians, Galindo was in the process of creating a composition entitled Botwin. The resulting composition is a musical commemoration of Polish-Jewish participation in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War or, as it is called on the website of the Centro de Música Contemporánea Garaikideak with which Galindo is associated, "a tribute to the forgotten civil war". It includes two poems by the Polish-Jewish Yiddish poet Leib Olitzky (1894-1975) and the Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012).1

In this post I want to discuss the use of Drupal and Drupal distributions in academia, especially the humanities, where Drupal has become an increasingly popular CMS in recent years.

This has not always been the case. Traditionally, Wordpress has been a popular choice among humanists, especially for personal websites/blogs, and in humanities institutes in general, particularly for conference and project websites (see also my post on building a blog with Drupal here). Given its relatively easy learning curve, out-of-the-box functionality and general ease of use this is an understandable choice, if also a self-perpetuating one: given the scarce availability of resources in many humanities institutes, previous experience with a particular system is often a key criterion, even when other systems might suit a project's functional demands better. 

When I decided to create this website the first question that came up was: which CMS will I use? I built a previous version with Wordpress which is pretty much ideal for a blog-oriented website. But as it happens I built several websites with Drupal already and I currently work as a web developer using Drupal Commons to create a major new website relating to Dutch history.

Since 2005 I maintain a website called Yiddish Sources which is a portal for anyone who is interested in Yiddish and Yiddish Studies. One of the side effects of maintaining this website is that it gives an insight into how the web is used, or can be used, to promote and share historical and cultural heritage online.

At the recent National Council on Public History annual meeting in Milwaukee I participated in a working group called Public History Online: Using the Web to Collaborate and Share. The goal of the working group was to "discuss how we can build more democratic and sustainable cultural institutions using digital technology and the web". Visit the blog to read the reflections of all participants. Below is the piece that I wrote on my project (with a big thanks to my colleagues at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands who commented on various drafts). 

By the way, be sure to check the new International Federation for Public History. 

Building an Online Community for Historians in The Netherlands

Introduction