By Janna Katharina Müller

In my last blog post, I wrote about the source corpus for my master’s thesis – the journal “Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmelskunde” (MC) – and my plan to subject it to digital analysis. The main thing I needed for my analysis was a digital text. Thanks to the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena, the scanned originals of the MC are available online, but only as non-machine-readable PDF files. The first step towards usable data was thus to generate a text from image files.

However, it was essential to consider the type of writing used in the MC: As can be seen from the example page below, the MC was printed in a font that uses, among other things, the long s (“ſ”), an archaic form of the lower-case letter s. Unlike most German publications of the early 19^th century, however, this is not a fractional font such as Fraktur, but rather an Antiqua font with serifs, which contains rounded arcs and was used primarily for Latin, Italian, and French texts, but was rather uncommon in German prints.

OCR with Tesseract

One of the best-known ways to recognize text is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the electronic or mechanical conversion of images into machine-coded text based on the recognition of individual characters.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2105

By Lea Katharina Neikes

The German Historical Institute (GHI) Washington DC, in collaboration with external partners, has organized an ongoing conference and workshop series about Jewish refugees in global transit between the 1930s and 1960s. The workshop was held 2018 in Kolkata, 2019 at the GHI Pacific Regional Office in Berkeley, and 2020 and 2021 as an online workshop due to the pandemic. As former interns, Paul Diekmann and I were invited to participate as guests at the Oct. 25-26 online workshop. Especially the discussion about the destination Shanghai, a rich and multifaceted topic, turned out to be fascinating.

After the November pogrom in 1938, while almost all other countries had closed their borders to German Jews, only Shanghai remained as one of the last places of refuge from the German Reich. Until 1941, it was still possible to enter the French and international parts of the city without a visa. Around 18,000 to 20,000 German-speaking refugees came to Shanghai.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2126

By Götz Lachwitz

Editorial note: Götz Lachwitz has been a research specialist at the German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) at Potsdam-Babelsberg since August 2020. His responsibilities include coordination and advice on ARD-wide and general research inquiries serving academics and other scholars. Previously, he was a research assistant in the DFG project “History of Documentary Film in Germany” and a doctoral student at the University of Hamburg, where he was part of the research training group „Vergegenwärtigungen. Repräsentationen der Shoah in komparatistischer Perspektive“ [Recollections:Representations of the Shoah in Comparative Perspective]

Are you a researcher and are looking for an overview of German radio and television coverage on your research topic? Are you interested in radio and television reports by specific journalists, cinematographers, or other media professionals from the last 100 years? Are you working on a comparative study of broadcasting in East and West Germany during the Cold War and are still looking for relevant sources? Then you need access to the German broadcasting heritage, and to the archives of public broadcasting.

Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2075

Von Götz Lachwitz

Editorische Notiz: Götz Lachwitz ist seit August 2020 wissenschaftlicher Fachreferent beim Deutschen Rundfunkarchiv am Standort Potsdam-Babelsberg. Zu seinen Aufgaben gehört unter anderem die Koordination und Beratung bei ARD-weiten und allgemeinen Anfragen aus Wissenschaft und Forschung. Zuvor war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im DFG-Projekt „Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland“ und Doktorand an der Universität Hamburg, wo er im Rahmen des Graduiertenkollegs „Vergegenwärtigungen. Repräsentationen der Shoah in komparatistischer Perspektive“ promoviert hat.

Sie sind Wissenschaftler*in und brauchen einen Überblick über die deutsche Radio- und Fernsehberichterstattung zu ihrem Forschungsthema? Sie interessieren sich für Radio- und Fernsehbeiträge von bestimmten Journalist*innen, Kameraleuten oder anderen Medienschaffenden aus den letzten 100 Jahren? Sie arbeiten an einer vergleichenden Studie über den Rundfunk in Ost- und Westdeutschland während des Kalten Krieges und suchen noch nach relevanten Quellen? Dann brauchen Sie Zugang zum deutschen Rundfunkerbe und zu den Archiven des öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunks.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2064

By Chiara Fralick

Chiara A. Fralick is a graduate student of North American Studies at the University of Cologne. She has focused on art and literatures of the 19th century as well as Indigenous oral histories. Currently she is researching interactions of poetry and land ethics in the environmental humanities. The working title of her Master’s thesis is “Nature Spirited Away: Exploring Ecological Empathy through Native Nations Poetics.” In the fall of 2021, she completed her remote internship at the GHI Washington, DC.

The other day I found myself wondering when I had been to a museum last. I love a good exhibition, so it’s an odd thing for me not to remember.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2046

By Paul Diekmann

Paul Diekmann is studying history and American studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently working on his bachelor’s thesis about the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. His remote internship at the GHI from August to Oktober 2021 has not only advanced his thesis a lot, but also allowed him to work on a variety of historical projects while broadening his skills. Being an active member of the student council at his home university, he has participated in every edition of the Junge Mommsen so far – twice as editor, once as an author.

The Junge Mommsen was born in 2018 at our student council’s annual summer retreat. Because most exams at Humboldt University’s department of history take the form of term papers, we thought about ways of sharing examples of good papers. Somebody mentioned that there already existed a cabinet with term papers that received good grades in our student council’s room. However those were accessed only once or twice a semester – there had to be a way to make this collection more accessible.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2043

Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/2022

By Janna Katharina Müller

Editorial note: Janna Katharina Müller studies the history and theory of science and technology [“Theorie und Geschichte der Wissenschaft und Technik”] at the Technische Universität Berlin. She’s currently working on her Master’s thesis focusing on the emergence and formation of a concept of the newly discovered asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in the first years after their discovery, 1801–1813. The title of her thesis is: “Von Planeto-Cometen und planetarischen Fragmenten. Die Himmels-Polizey und Asteroidenforschung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert.“ In the spring/summer 2021, she completed a remote internship at the GHI Washington, DC.

A while ago, I was preparing for an oral exam in one of my classes about the history of science during the Enlightenment and the early 19^th century. We had to focus on one specific discipline or time period and give a short presentation about it.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1999

Editorial Note: Professor Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson has been Chair of the Transatlantic History and Culture Department at the University of Augsburg since 2016. Previously, she served for five years as Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on Transatlantic relations, African American history, women’s history, and religious history.

As part of her blog series on the history of the women’s movement in a transatlantic perspective, Marietheres Pirngruber spoke with Professor Waldschmidt-Nelson in April 2021.

Interview: Marietheres Pirngruber
Translation: Erik Brown

During your time at the GHI, you published an anthology on the transatlantic linkages of the women’s rights movement. What fascinates you about this topic?

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1995