Workshop History of Digital History between East and West - Book of Abstracts

This is the book of abstracts of the workshop History of Digital History between East and West, which is held on 5-6 February 2026 at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg.

The workshop is jointly organised by Gerben Zaagsma (University of Luxembourg), Marek Tamm (Tallinn University), Julianne Nyhan (Technische Universität Darmstadt and University College London), Petri Paju (University of Turku), Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Stockholm University) and Nadezhda Povroznik (Technische Universität Darmstadt).

Workshop description

In histories of digital history, as in digital humanities in general, much emphasis has been placed on the two commonly recognized centers of the development of historical computing since the 1950s: the United States and Western Europe. As a result, crucial developments elsewhere have been overlooked, including in the Nordic countries as well as the Soviet Union and the various states of the Eastern bloc. The consequence of this omission is not merely a lack of knowledge about specific countries and a skewed understanding of digital history’s manifold early trajectories. It also creates epistemological blind spots regarding the political dimensions of the development of early historical computing and, given the latter’s networked nature within a general context of ‘East-West’ scholarly exchange in the Cold War period, obscures the transnational dimensions of the early history of digital history.

This workshop will address these blind spots by focusing attention on the question of how the local and the transnational intersected in the technology-inflected reshaping of historical research practices and how political backgrounds, contexts and constraints fed into this process.