Description
This paper aims to reinvigorate ongoing historiographical debates about attitudes and behaviors during wartime occupation, by bringing together mass-digitised personal historical records (‘egodocuments’) and text mining techniques derived from the field of the digital humanities. In this process, we aim to 1) evaluate the argumentative potential of digital history in the context of an established and contested historiographical debate and 2) reflect on the pitfalls and possibilities of using computer-assisted methodologies in analyzing datasets of digitised historical egodocuments for this purpose. The latter becomes only more relevant, as such data not only differs from datasets that are more common to digital history research, such as newspapers or political proceedings, but also because the digitisation of egodocuments is expected to be further propelled by the ongoing development of technologies for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and the lowering of the boundaries for access to and application of these techniques (e.g., open-source software package loghi, or the READ-COOP’s Transkribus platform).Building on the outcomes of the recent (2020-2023) digitisation project ‘First-Hand Accounts of War: War letters (1935-1950) from NIOD digitised’ at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, we aim to study so-called ‘interpretative horizons’ of several groups of contemporaries during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Tapping into existing debates and insights on ‘agency’ and ‘spaces of possibilities’ in World War II historiography, we use a systematic, computer-assisted analysis of digitised personal correspondences to investigate the deliberations that contemporaries, whether consciously or not, had to make in light of the measures imposed by living under Nazi occupation. What threats, opportunities, and other focal points did they identify? Which did they overlook? It is crucial to bear in mind that the Nazi occupation regime deliberately cultivated a context of deception and ambiguity. For instance, according to Nazi propaganda, Jews were purportedly being sent to the East for 'labor' rather than extermination. Such deception inevitably influenced the considerations of Jewish contemporaries in World War II.
Our core topic provides great potential for integrating new research processes, methodologies, and (digital) source collections into more traditional historical narratives. At the same time, it amounts to a broader research agenda that requires further debate and reflection. In our paper, we will therefore discuss our work-in-progress using Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify and map personal social networks of our wartime letter writers, and the application of dependency parsing as part of our methodology to explore their perceived courses of action, threats, and points of focus. We will share our thoughts, considerations, and preliminary findings regarding operationalizing a complex, sensitive, and multifaceted conceptual framework within the context of digital history research. We will show the epistemological and methodological aspects of engaging with and contributing to existing historiographical debates using methods and techniques under the umbrella of ‘digital history’, and reflect on the difficulties of engaging with more traditional historical debates.
Period | 25 Jun 2024 |
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Event title | Historical Arguments and the Digital 2024 |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Belval, LuxembourgShow on map |
Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Egodocuments
- Digitisation
- World war II
- Nazi occupation
- Interpretative horizons
- digital history
- text mining
- archival science
- archival theory