“On 10-12 October 2019, the international conference ‘Digital Hermeneutics: from Research to Dissemination’ took place at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington DC. The conference aimed to critically reflect on the radical impact of the digital turn on all stages of historical research, including archiving, research, analysis, interpretation and dissemination on a transatlantic level.” Read the full report by Tim Van Der Heijden, Juliane Tatarinov, and Gerben Zaagsma, C2DH, posted on November 5, 2019.
The GHI benefits
tremendously from the help of its many talented interns. The following post was
written by GHDI project intern Isabella Auerbach, a student at the University
of Pennsylvania, who is majoring in European history. — Editorial
note, Href
The Nuremberg Trials Project, an ongoing digitization effort by the Harvard Law School Library (HLSL), is an open-access initiative aimed at transporting the documents relating to the 1945 to 1949 tribunals to an online platform. The project, first conceived in the late 1990s, features a highly organized website that provides ample introductory information regarding the Nuremberg trials, along with the trial documents themselves.
A document provided by the Nuremberg Trials Project, containing excerpts to be used in GHDI Volume 7
I was fortunate enough to speak with Paul Deschner, the project manager for the Nuremberg Trials Project and an Application Developer at the library’s Innovation Lab, who was first brought on to the project due to his professional background in software engineering. Deschner discussed both the history and potential future of this undertaking, emphasizing the ongoing significance of these documents, which were produced over seventy years ago.
History of the Documents
Documents relating to the Nuremberg
trials were published almost immediately after the conclusion of the
International Military Tribunal (IMT), the earliest of the thirteen trials.
The bauhaus bookshelf is a bilingual (German-English) online resource created by Andrea Riegel, a partner at the Düsseldorf-based communication design agency Riegel+Reichenthaler. Riegel also created Design is fine. History is mine, a popular blog on design and art history. The bauhaus bookshelf, a labor of love launched in 2019, combines access to reproductions of original Bauhaus publications with a timeline, excerpts, photographs, and other contextual information. The download is for personal, non-commercial use only. While many events and publications in 2019 celebrate the Bauhaus centennial, the bauhaus bookshelf is the only comprehensive online gateway to original Bauhaus publications and sources.
Href interviewed Andrea Riegel, the virtual bookshelf’s creator and curator.
What inspired you to develop the bilingual bauhaus bookshelf?
Dasbauhaus bookshelfist ein zweisprachiges virtuelles Bücherregal, das von Andrea Riegel konzipiert und umgesetzt wurde. Andrea Riegel, Partnerin beim Düsseldorfer Gestaltungsbüro Riegel und Reichenthaler, hat schonDesign is Fine, History is Mine, entwickelt, eine beliebte Plattform zur Design-und Kunstgeschichte. Andrea Riegel hat dasbauhaus bookshelfin ihrer Freizeit entwickelt und 2019 Online gestellt. Das sehr schön gestaltete virtuelle Bücheregal verbindet den Zugang zu digitalisierten Originalquellen mit einer Zeitleiste, Auszügen, Fotos und anderen Informationen über den historischen Kontext des Materials. Die meisten der Reproduktionen wurden von Bibliotheken, Archiven und Museen über Creative Commons Lizenzen (CC-BY-SA-4.0) zur Verfügung gestellt und Nutzer können das Material über die Seite für die private Nutzung herunterladen. Zwar erscheinen zum Bauhausjubiläum in diesem Jahr eine Reihe neuer Publikationen und es finden sehr viele Veranstaltungen statt, aber das bauhaus bookshelfist die einzige Webseite, die Nutzerinnen einen übersichtlichen Zugang zu Originalquellen und Publikationen eröffnet.
Interview mit Andrea Riegel
Was hat Sie dazu inspiriert, das zweisprachige Bauhaus bookshelf zu entwickeln?
The DDF, launched last year, is a new portal dedicated to
making selected historical sources documenting the history of women’s movements
in (mostly) German speaking countries available online to a broad public
audience. The portal features thematic essays that provide context for selected
documents, as well as biographical essays on key actors, for example on Louise
Otto Peters or Clara Zetkin.
The portal combines digitized sources from over 40 archives, libraries and
other memory institutions that are collecting resources documenting the history
of women’s and lesbian movements.
Particularly relevant for today is Kerstin Wolff’s essay
on the history of the International Women’s Day, which was initiated by the
International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1910, and first
celebrated in Denmark, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Switzerland and the United
States. Wolff highlights the role of Clara Zetkin und Käte Duncker in mobilizing
support for International Women’s Day as part of the campaign for women’s
suffrage.
Launched by Her Majesty The Queen in 2015, the Georgian Papers Programme (GPP) is an interdisciplinary partnership to conserve, digitise and catalogue 425,000 pages of material held by the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period, 1714–1837, encompassing the reigns of the five Hanoverian kings (George I, George II, George III, George IV, and William IV). The papers include private, official, and financial material pertaining to the monarchs and their families, papers of various courtiers and ministers, and in addition records which relate to the running of the Georgian royal households. The papers are invaluable in all areas of eighteenth-century study, for they shed light on matters of political, social, economic and military history, as well as international relations and medical knowledge in the Georgian period.
The Georgian Papers Programme is expected to take ten years to complete, with the core cataloguing work taking place within the walls of Windsor Castle, in the Royal Archives and Royal Library. The Programme’s principal partners are the Royal Archives and Royal Collection Trust (RCT), King’s College London (the academic lead), the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (lead American partner), and the College of William & Mary.[1] The Programme has taken an ambitious approach to developing an integrated workflow that simultaneously supports access, cataloguing and dissemination of digital facsimiles and transcriptions to create a virtuous feedback loop between the expertise of archivists and academics. The Programme has two ultimate ambitions: to optimise public, freely available access supported by enhanced metadata and interpretation; and, to provide a collaborative workspace in which scholars may explore, interrogate and manipulate data using a variety of online tools.
The German Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives of Germany) launched the portal „Weimar: Die erste deutsche Demokratie“ [Weimar: The First German Democracy] in March 2018. The portal offers access to thousands of digitized records, maps, photographs, films, audio recordings, and posters from the Weimar Republic, with new materials being added on an ongoing basis. Href interviewed Vera Zahnhausen* about the portal, which is one of the major recent digital initiatives of the Bundesarchiv. –Editorial note, href.
What sparked the development of „Weimar: die erste deutsche Demokratie”?
We realized that the upcoming centennial of the November Revolution of 1918 and subsequent centennial anniversaries commemorating the Weimar Republic would draw considerable public attention to this period in German history.
Though the Ottoman empire controlled a significant portion of the Balkan region in the early modern era, the historiographical traditions established by historical texts created in the region during that period has received comparatively little attention as a research topic.[1] To fill this gap in research and to make the resulting data publicly available, the Historiography in Ottoman Europe project was developed with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) to create a database that would include metadata for several hundred primary sources from the years 1500 to 1800 and over 3,600 secondary works on the history of Ottoman Europe. The project’s funding is coming to an end this year, but the site will remain active and invites feedback, partnerships and additional submissions of relevant data.[2]
project logo by André Hagenbruch (†)
The project is a collaboration between the office of the Chair for the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Lehrstuhl für Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches und der Türkei, ORT) of Ruhr University Bochum and Bochum University Library. Both institutions brought their specific expertise to the project and worked in synergy to create fresh research data and conceptualize a customized, optimized way of presenting these findings for added utility. The team members from the ORT office conducted research in libraries and archives worldwide to locate, examine and describe neglected sources and to compile relevant secondary material on these documents. Team members from the library oversaw the project’s web presence and entered data collected by the research team members into the jointly conceptualized system. They validated the information and complemented it with links, filters and further metadata to create the specific data sets that characterize the HOE corpus.
As part of the Year of German-American Friendship 2018/19 (Deutschlandjahr USA), the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI) is cooperating with the Deutsches Auswandererhaus, Bremerhaven, on a joint project entitled Crossing the Atlantic/Bridging the Divide. Co-sponsored initiatives include a digital exhibition of maps of Germany and America; workshops on German-American family history in three U.S. cities; and the launch of an English-language online portal for documenting German-American family history. These planned initiatives align with the primary themes of Deutschlandjahr, which include German heritage and German language, and digitization and innovation.
Last month, the GHI began work on its core contribution to the joint project: an online exhibition provisionally entitled Mapping Germany and America. The exhibition is being developed in partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Center for Digital Humanities, which is led by Prof. Helmut Walser Smith. Beginning with Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507, the exhibition will feature approximately sixty maps: thirty maps of America by Germans and thirty maps of Germany by Americans.
The GHI benefits tremendously from the help of its many talented interns. The following post was written by GHDI project intern Milena Kagel, who first learned of this website at the Defining Black European History conference at the GHI in June 2018. — Editorial note, Href
By Milena Kagel
Every spring, Kira Thurman teaches an undergraduate course on “Germany and the Black Diaspora” at the University of Michigan. Since 2016, this course has included a digital history component – Thurman and her students have worked to construct a visual representation of the history of Black people in Central Europe by recording figures, objects, and events related to that history. Each student is required to contribute five entries to an online mapping project entitled Mapping Black Central Europe.
The map currently features around two hundred pins, each of which is connected to a detailed profile on a person, object, or event. The pins are geographically widespread, with the greatest concentration appearing in Germany.
The 
