Digitale Werkzeuge in der Quellenarbeit

Krauer, Philipp; Schwery, Nick; Mähr, Moritz

doi:10.5281/zenodo.17553054

Published February 14, 2019 | Version v1

Event Open

Digitale Werkzeuge in der Quellenarbeit

1. ETH Zurich
2. ETH Zürich Foundation

Workshop for doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences held at the Collegium Helveticum in Zürich on 14 February 2019. The event explored how digital tools and infrastructures are transforming historical and social-scientific source work. Participants discussed methodological challenges in searching, processing, and mediating digital sources. The workshop featured short research presentations and thematic discussions rather than formal papers.

Other (English)

The workshop Digitale Werkzeuge in der Quellenarbeit (“Digital Tools in Source Work”) was held on 14 February 2019 at the Collegium Helveticum in Zürich. Organized by Philipp Krauer, Moritz Mähr, and Nick Schwery (ETH Zürich), it brought together doctoral students from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to discuss the implications of digital transformation for historical and archival research practices.

The workshop addressed a fundamental shift in scholarly source work: today, researchers often encounter sources first as digital representations—through catalogues, databases, and platforms such as Google, Wikipedia, or library repositories—before ever handling physical artefacts. While such digital infrastructures enable unprecedented access and collaboration across borders, they also raise new epistemological and methodological challenges. Participants examined questions of authenticity, materiality, and selectivity in digital archives; the biases of search algorithms; and the epistemic consequences of “born-digital” and digitized materials.

Rather than offering polished research papers, contributors presented short case studies and open research questions related to their own projects. Discussions focused on three interconnected aspects of digital source work: searching, processing, and communicating historical data.

Program

10:15 Coffee & pastries
10:30 Introduction and participant roundtable

Session I – Searching (Chair: Philipp Krauer)

Sina Steglich (University of Konstanz): Archival authenticity? Sources and their digital alter ego
Katrin Keller (University of Bern): Challenges and strategies of digital research in historical projects
Moritz Mähr (ETH Zürich): Networks as search strategy: What can social network analysis contribute to historical research?

12:10 Lunch break

Session II – Processing (Chair: Moritz Mähr)

Anna Neovesky (University of Mainz): Relevance criteria for search results in scientific collections
Natalia Korchagina (University of Zürich): Automatic extraction of temporal expressions from historical German texts
Rahel Estermann (University of Lucerne): (No) new toolbox? Digital methods in sociology, data journalism, and data science

15:00 Afternoon break

Session III – Communicating (Chair: Nick Schwery)

Lucas Federer (University of Zürich): QR codes for historical source work
Marcel Rothen (University of Bern): Reflections on the edition and analysis of the Stapfer-Enquête of 1799

16:20 Final discussion, feedback, and outlook
17:15 Apéro

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