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CulturHist has its sights particularly on the community of researchers, who have done little to make the results and suggestions offered by the digital humanities their own. We want to focus the discussion on a cross cutting issue: the link to archives, as the raw material for writing an account of the past. The habit of working digitally of those historians who do not nowadays verbalise their computer practices is now widespread and is bolstered by policies aimed at making many digitised document collections available online. For example, a search using the Internet Archive wayback machine developed by a not-for-profit company which archives the Web, shows that, in January 2002, Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France), reported having 80 000 documents online, as compared to a little over 5.8 million on 4 September 2019. These days, it is possible to carry out international historical investigations without being in physical contact with a document, as was demonstrated as far back as 2011 by the Data mining with criminal intent project (Cohen et al.). This means that researchers often become data managers (Cartier et al.). Most researchers now practise these habits, and there is an urgent need to analyse them and adapt initial and further training in history in order to help students and historians grasp how ways of writing history are being changed.

Talk about (1) applying distant reading to oral histories and (2) Using oral histories for better understanding of big data

This contribution discusses the potentials and challenges of using digitised newspapers as a source in relation to other newspaper collections, digitised or not. The author argues that digitisation makes the pitfall of media-centrism even more visible and calls for an even more careful contextualisation of media sources. Instead of focusing too narrowly on a sample of seemingly “representative” digitised newspapers, digitisation may in fact invite us to multiply the types of sources and perspectives we include in our research. Dealing with such diverse sources, both digitized and non-digitized, requires that we highlight how we think about, construct, and analyse our corpus. Ultimately, digitisation can lead to a more exploratory and iterative research approach and thus an understanding of the research corpus as an evolving, interconnected, and reflexive collection of diverse sources.

This chapter assesses the general and academic uses of social media (most particularly twitter) during the Centenary of the First World War., Ce chapitre porte sur les usages du grand public et des historiens et historiennes des réseaux sociaux numériques et plus particulièrement Twitter

This presentation addresses the use, re-use, access and dissemination of data related to web archives. Web archives (Brügger, 2018) have been for several years in a hybrid position regarding access, depending on the institutions that were preserving them. While Internet Archive has made its collections available online since 2001 through the Wayback Machine (but with limited features for scholars willing to conduct a distant reading based on data, WARC files, etc.), most national libraries only allowed an onsite access due to authors rights restrictions (and in some cases the frame of legal deposits), while starting to provide interesting metadata for research projects willing to explore them. However, the situation is currently evolving in the frame of several research projects that allow to access a vast amount of (international) metadata and datasets. Taking two research projects in progress as case studies, WARCnet and AWAC2, this paper aims to present the move towards the use of metadata and derived data related to huge collections of web archives of the COVID crisis. WARCnet (Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events) is a network whose activities (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities (grant no 9055-00005B)) run in 2020-2023. The networking activities are guided by overarching research questions, one of them being “How transnational events developed on the European web?” (and notably the COVID crisis which is explored in WG2 (https://cc.au.dk/en/warcnet/working-groups)). AWAC2 (Analysing Web Archives of the COVID Crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset) is a project part of the Archives Unleashed Cohort Program, that supports and facilitates research engagement with web archives. It aims to explore a unique collection of web material (https://archive-it.org/collections/13529) related to the pandemic, with contributions from over 30 members of IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) as well as

Building upon our experience with ARCH, our study related to the IIPC Novel Coronavirus collection, as well as upon the first months of research we conducted as a cohort team in the Archives Unleashed Project, we will provide feedback related to users’ needs and achievements. Ian Milligan distinguished in his paper “You shouldn’t Need to be a Web Historian to Use Web Archives: Lowering Barriers to Access Through Community and Infrastructure” (WARCnet paper, Aarhus, 2020), three personas: a computational humanist, a digital humanist, and a conventional historian. As an heterogeneous team, mirroring in some ways the personas distinguished by Ian Milligan, we will underline the successes and failures we experienced, the technical layers and levels we unfolded, our experience of collective work which also needs to take interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity (of technical skills, interests, availability, digital literacy) into account, the value of mentorship and our iterative process with data and research questions. We will finally shortly discuss the many pros and few cons in lowering barriers to access web archives (e.g. How to make access easiest without hiding the complexity of web archives?).

Europe’s twentieth century was characterised by competing and/or conflicting visions about the organisation of the continent. This general introduction explains why the editors decided to focus on the Cold War period, briefly sets out the broader historical context, and finally clarifies the use of the word ‘asymmetry.’, Le vingtième siècle européen a été caractérisé par des visions concurrentes et/ou conflictuelles de l'organisation du continent. Cette introduction générale explique pourquoi les éditeurs ont décidé de se concentrer sur la période de la guerre froide, présente brièvement le contexte historique plus large et clarifie enfin l'utilisation du mot "asymétrie".

Le Goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique est un projet co-dirigé par Caroline Muller et Frédéric Clavert. Livre en ligne écrit de manière collaborative, il entend interroger les routines numériques « discrètes » des historiens face à l’archive, y compris au moment de la constitution du corpus, et examiner les conséquences possibles pour l’écriture de l’histoire de cette introduction, tant logicielle que matérielle, de l’informatique dans les pratiques historiennes. Les différentes contributions en ligne qui alimentent ce livre « vivant » traitent tout à la fois de la collecte des archives et de la constitution des corpus, du gigantisme de ces corpus numérisés ou nativement numériques et des relations à l’archive ainsi qu’à la salle de lecture. Ces témoignages à teneur ethnographique permettent ainsi de dégager quelques conclusions intermédiaires sur les pratiques informatiques et numériques exposées. Quelle place occupe l’outillage de l’historien dans l’écriture de l’histoire ? Quelle diversité de pratiques numériques se cachent ainsi derrière ce Goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique ? Quels contrastes entre les disciplines ces pratiques reflètent- elles ? Ce retour d’expérience de publication collective permet à la fois d’esquisser des réponses ainsi que d’offrir des pers- pectives d’étude sur cette nouvelle relation à l’archive.

This presentation addresses the use, re-use, access and dissemination of data related to web archives. Web archives (Brügger, 2018) have been for several years in a hybrid position regarding access, depending on the institutions that were preserving them. While Internet Archive has made its collections available online since 2001 through the Wayback Machine (but with limited features for scholars willing to conduct a distant reading based on data, WARC files, etc.), most national libraries only allowed an onsite access due to authors rights restrictions (and in some cases the frame of legal deposits), while starting to provide interesting metadata for research projects willing to explore them. However, the situation is currently evolving in the frame of several research projects that allow to access a vast amount of (international) metadata and datasets. Taking two research projects in progress as case studies, WARCnet and AWAC2, this paper aims to present the move towards the use of metadata and derived data related to huge collections of web archives of the COVID crisis. WARCnet (Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events) is a network whose activities (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities (grant no 9055-00005B)) run in 2020-2023. The networking activities are guided by overarching research questions, one of them being “How transnational events developed on the European web?” (and notably the COVID crisis which is explored in WG2 (https://cc.au.dk/en/warcnet/working-groups)). AWAC2 (Analysing Web Archives of the COVID Crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset) is a project part of the Archives Unleashed Cohort Program, that supports and facilitates research engagement with web archives. It aims to explore a unique collection of web material (https://archive-it.org/collections/13529) related to the pandemic, with contributions from over 30 members of IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) as well as

Building upon our experience with ARCH, our study related to the IIPC Novel Coronavirus collection, as well as upon the first months of research we conducted as a cohort team in the Archives Unleashed Project, we will provide feedback related to users’ needs and achievements. Ian Milligan distinguished in his paper “You shouldn’t Need to be a Web Historian to Use Web Archives: Lowering Barriers to Access Through Community and Infrastructure” (WARCnet paper, Aarhus, 2020), three personas: a computational humanist, a digital humanist, and a conventional historian. As an heterogeneous team, mirroring in some ways the personas distinguished by Ian Milligan, we will underline the successes and failures we experienced, the technical layers and levels we unfolded, our experience of collective work which also needs to take interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity (of technical skills, interests, availability, digital literacy) into account, the value of mentorship and our iterative process with data and research questions. We will finally shortly discuss the many pros and few cons in lowering barriers to access web archives (e.g. How to make access easiest without hiding the complexity of web archives?).

Europe’s twentieth century was characterised by competing and/or conflicting visions about the organisation of the continent. This general introduction explains why the editors decided to focus on the Cold War period, briefly sets out the broader historical context, and finally clarifies the use of the word ‘asymmetry.’, Le vingtième siècle européen a été caractérisé par des visions concurrentes et/ou conflictuelles de l'organisation du continent. Cette introduction générale explique pourquoi les éditeurs ont décidé de se concentrer sur la période de la guerre froide, présente brièvement le contexte historique plus large et clarifie enfin l'utilisation du mot "asymétrie".

The aim of this guide is to provide a starting point for using web archives as a source for social science research. With the migration of many aspects of the so- cial world online, fundamental questions have been raised about how and even when social science research happens in the online sphere (Karpf, 2012). Web archives, or archives of content and communications from the Web through time, crucially provide the means for retrospectively studying dynamic media and online interactions that are often subject to change and deletion. In addition to the opportunities afforded by web archives as a primary source, however, given their scale and complexity, these collections also present challenges for researchers who want to use them. This guide provides a primer for how to approach web archives research design by first outlining what web archives are and how they differ from other types of web data, as well as identifying key sources for web archives collections. Following this, we provide several high-level descriptions and examples of existing research to demonstrate how web archives offer particular methodological opportunities for studying different types of web phenomena. Next, we draw on the literature to highlight three key considerations for designing a project using web archives, including the ethical implications of using archived web data without the consent of content producers. The guide concludes by summarising the opportunities and challenges of using web archives and provides additional sources to consult.

The three research articles in this special issue and the interview with Ronda Hauben are partly the result of the 4th RESAW conference, that brought together through the RESAW network a community of researchers, web archivists and professionals, united around a common interest, namely web history and web archives. The 4th RESAW conference, organised on 17 and 18 June 2021 by the C2DH (Centre for contemporary and digital history) at the University of Luxembourg, sought to examine the tension between marginal and mainstream in web history, and to go beyond this binary view. The aim was to study all the nuances, shifts in meaning, difficulties in defining and measuring audiences, as well as the evolution over the course of history of digital practices, content, producers, and communities, from the fringes and peripheries to the centre and the core of the Web. The RESAW conference was also an opportunity to launch the HIVI research project , hosted at the C2DH, and the topics that were addressed at the conference were also related to virality.

Digitised Historical Newspapers: A Changing Research Landscape was published in Digitised Newspapers A New Eldorado for Historians? on page 1.

Les données massives, ou Big Data, issues de sites Web et réseaux sociaux numériques sous la forme d’écrits, d’images, de vidéos ou de métadonnées, constituent des sources non négligeables pour les recherches actuelles ou futures en histoire culturelle. Ces traces numériques, collectées à l’initiative des chercheurs ou d’institutions, exigent des réflexions méthodologiques, de leur archivage à leur valorisation, dans le cadre de leur analyse à différentes échelles (scalable reading). Elles permettent en effet de dégager de nouvelles frontières spatio-temporelles, mais également des asymétries et distorsions entre la portée théorique du Big Data (de la milliseconde à la longue durée, du mètre au globe) et sa portée pratique (inégalités régionales dans les collectes, bruits et silences au sein des archives). En s’appuyant sur différents projets de recherche et initiatives institutionnelles, cet article propose une réflexion sur l’espace-temps du patrimoine nativement numérique en l’abordant sous l’angle des données, des collections et de la recherche, afin de saisir à la fois les conséquences de cet archivage massif sur l’histoire et le métier d’historien et de dégager les problématiques actuelles de ces sources historiques pour la recherche académique., Massive data, also known as Big Data - originating from websites and digital social networks, in the form of text, images, videos or metadata -, constitute significant sources for recent and future research in cultural history. These “digital traces”, collected by researchers or institutions, require further methodological thoughts - from their archiving to their development, in order to analyse them at different scales (scalable reading). Indeed, they allow researchers to identify new spatiotemporal boundaries, but also asymmetries and distortions between the theoretical scope of Big Data (from the millisecond to the long term, from the meter to the globe) and its practical scope (regional inequalities in collection, noise and silences within the archives). Based on several research projects and institutional initiatives, this article aims at thinking about the space-time of born-digital heritage, from the standpoint of data, collections and research, in order to grasp both the consequences of this massive archiving on the shaping of history and the profession of historian, and to identify the ongoing issues of these historical sources for academic research.

Professeur des Universités en histoire des relations internationals contemporaines à l’Université Paul Verlaine de Metz puis à Sciences Po Strasbourg, Sylvain Schirmann a marqué, par son enseignement, des générations d’étudiants : ceux, bien sûr, de la faculté d’histoire de Metz, de l’Institut des hautes études européennes et de l’Institut d’études politiques de Strasbourg, mais aussi ceux de l’École nationale d’administration ou de l’Université du Luxembourg, ainsi que les élèves des deux campus – de Bruges et de Natolin – du Collège d’Europe. Tous ont été frappés par le charisme, la clarté et la force de conviction de Sylvain Schirmann. Tous ont été impressionnés par sa capacité à traiter de thèmes très variés, révélateurs de sa curiosité intellectuelle comme de son refus de se limiter à ses sujets de prédilection. Tous ont été sensibles à sa façon de problématiser ses cours et, dans le même mouvement, d’en décrypter les lignes de force. Tous ont été convaincus par sa lecture fine et saillante des relations internationales, par ses démonstrations, fondées sur de vastes lectures et une magistrale connaissance des sources d’archives. Tous ont eu la certitude de suivre les cours d’un grand prof ! Au moment même où Sylvain Schirmann fait valoir ses droits à la retraite, ses anciens thésards ont voulu lui rendre hommage à travers ce volume collectif investissant des thèmes qui lui sont chers. La quinzaine de contributions réunies ici s’ouvre sur l’itinéraire de cet historien passionné, rappelée par Marie-Thérèse Bitsch. Suivent des articles qui s’articulent autour de quatre grands axes : le rôle et l’action des syndicats en France et en Allemagne ; les voies multiples de la coopération et de la construction européennes ; les relations de l’Europe communautaire avec ses voisins proches ; enfin, le role des confrontations, des émotions et des mentalités collectives dans les relations internationales.

We explain in this editorial our updating policies that are designed to adapt to author’s, reader’s and editor’s needs. Using the concept of “updatism”, we also reflect on what it means to sustain a digital project such as the Journal of Digital History within our current digital environment, which is unstable by nature.

TRIBUNE. Alors que le rachat de Twitter a mis au jour la fragilité des contenus uniquement numériques, l’historien Frédéric Clavert appelle, dans une tribune au « Monde », à créer des mécanismes citoyens d’archivage pour « préserver l’information de notre époque ».

The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers have changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers. This volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up. ‘impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past’ is an interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools to digitised historical newspapers and integrates the resulting data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text mining tools and their use by humanities researchers is at the heart of the impresso enterprise.