“Reference works, like Wikipedia, often inherit the conflicts of the external world they seek to document and are being seized upon as exemplars of, and proxies in, those debates.” (J. Reagle) In 2014 Erik Borra, Esther Weltevrede and other researchers presented Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and offers insight into the development of […]
Author: Public History Student
Everybody Curator? Everybody Curator!
I’m a history-student so my mind immediately goes to museums, exhibitions and art-collections when I think of the word curator but this term is being used in a much broader context. It’s being used in fashion, the business world, the entertainment industry… In this digital age everyone curates their own lives online. “A new spin. Are DJs, rappers […]
The art of deframing
What would you do if you had unlimited access to more than 568.000 digital objects of the Rijksmuseum? The only thing you need is a working internet connection and a laptop. Seems too good to be true? No it is not. A year before the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum (2013) the museum made a new […]
Diversity and mainstream historical writing
In the 1960s and 1970s, with the social and cultural revolutions, the attention of scholars for minorities grew. Especially in the field of public history, inclusion is seen as an important aspect. The public historian must be there for everyone. Sadly, the attention for minorities faded in mainstream history writing after those decades. Nowadays, diversity […]
Enchanted technology ?: electronic media in contemporary museums
The large-scale emergence of digital media caused a serious transition in many scientific disciplines including history. Digital media has made many new possibilities of practicing history. One of the most important changes is that Big Data offers historians new ways to interpreted and identify specific historical events and link them to bigger historical patterns. For example, […]
DIY: your own Oral History Project
In “Ongekend bijzonder” (former) refugees give their life history. With a project on Indonesian veterans, “Verhalen van Groninger Indië-veteranen“, the Oorlogs- and verzetscentrum Groningen wanted be current to society’s issues. The Jewish Museum in Amsterdam brought a large selection of interviews of Jewish survivors of the Second World War from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute […]
Current lessons from an outdated book
2005, the year that YouTube was founded, Facebook was relatively unknown and Myspace dominated the social networking market. It was also the year that Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig published their book ‘Digital History: a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web’, an introduction to the internet for people working in […]
Winds of change in an ivory tower
With history faculties worldwide looking as dusty as ever to most, it’s easy to miss that the discipline is in an era of rapid change. The computer revolution has already altered the ways in which historical research is presented and communicated to a broad audience and some projects, like Isao Hashimato’s 1945 – 1998, do […]
Say “Digital Humanities” one more goddamn time
The above meme featuring Samuel L. Jackson has circulated amongst students of the University of Amsterdam for the past few years. It is credited to Frank Ridgeway (2012) and sums up feelings of frustration when confronted with yet another lecture teaching the gospel of new, digital research methods and the joys of Big Data. […]
Hollandse folklore bij de wereldbond
Hollandse folklore bij de wereldbond In 1908 werd in Amsterdam het Congres van de Wereldbond voor Vrouwenkiesrecht georganiseerd. Tijdens dit congres is er een foto gemaakt van een groep mensen in Hollandse klederdracht, nadat zij een klompendans hadden uitgevoerd (Fig. 1). Een Hollandse klompendans tijdens een internationaal congres lijkt zeer uniek. De vraag die deze […]