Reconstructing Early Modern Hamburg's News World: Urban Space, Political Turmoil, and Local Publishing

If an early modern merchant returned to their home city and wanted to find out what had been going on in their absence, how did they do that? Where did they go to get information and comment? What kinds of printed materials could they get their hands on or hear about? These questions about media and urban history underpin the Hidden Hamburg app, which looks to translate historical research into public history using a locative approach that is both novel and designed to engage a wide audience. As with the other Hidden Cities trails discussed in this volume, our approach is to present early modern “experience” in today’s European cities through geolocated walks and place-related stories. Mobile technologies now offer an opportunity to rearticulate urban spaces and past lives for different publics, and in this sense all the Hidden Cities tours represent nuanced experiments in digital public history. Hidden Hamburg’s specific contribution is to digital humanities approaches to media history, book history, and communication history. In this chapter, we explore the research themes informing Hidden Hamburg’s app story – a hunt for news by a fictionalised character called Johann, a paper trader, who has just returned to the city after a business trip.

The open access chapter is part of this (open access) volume: Hidden Cities: Urban Space, Geolocated Apps and Public History in Early Modern Europe (eds.. Fabrizio Nevola, David Rosenthal, Nicholas Terpsta), London 2022 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003172000/hidden-cities-fabrizio-nevola-david-rosenthal-nicholas-terpstra