The radical impact of the digital turn on the practice of all stages of historical research (archiving, research, analysis, interpretation and narrative) requires critical reflection on the methodological and epistemological consequences of digital technologies for historical scholarship. The Fourth Annual GHI Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History will revolve around the concept of “digital hermeneutics,” defined as the critical and self-reflexive use of digital tools and technologies for the development of new research questions, the testing of analytical assumptions, and the production of sophisticated scholarly interpretations. At the same time, we wish to extend this concept to the realm of dissemination and storytelling. The conference thus aims to critically discuss tools and practices of digital historiography, on the one hand, and to focus on how the digital engenders new forms of public engagement and online dissemination of research results, on the other.

Digital History as first described by Edward L. Ayers in 1999 deals with “historical issues relating to digital or digitized source collections, which should (must) be carried out using interdisciplinary means of digital analysis or visualization.” (Föhr, Historische Quellenkritik im Digitalen Zeitalter, p. 8).

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