Conference Report Europast
written by Lennart Schmidt August 2024
The second Europast summer school is a collaborative project between the C2DH in Luxemburg, the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and the University of Lund, Sweden. The overarching topic was using digital tools for public history projects. The conference took place on the Belval campus of the University of Luxemburg from July 1 to 4, 2024. The four-day event took place in the historic setting of a former steel plant that was transformed into the campus of the University of Luxemburg. The Belval Campus is nestled between former assembly lines, large blast furnaces, and brick chimneys juxtaposed to newly built modern buildings. The campus provided an ideal setting to explore new formats, technologies, methods, and theories in the field of public history, which were often linked to Luxemburg's history as a major steel producer and its presence in the aftermath of that identity.
The conference started with a welcome session by Rhianne Morgan and Violeta Davolioute. The session was followed by Thomas Cauvin, the professor of public history at the C2DH, who introduced me to public history and the current in its practice. Thomas then introduced the public history team at the C2DH to the conference and talked about the various projects and working groups within the department.
We then jumped straight into our first hands-on workshop on Tropy, organised by Anita Lucches, part of Tropy’s developer team at C2DH. Tropy is an intuitive software that allows researchers to manage their archival files. It is specially built for visual archival sources ranging from paintings to photographs. The software has a built-in super zoom feature, tagging and organisation elements, and an intuitive UI. Anita gave us examples of best practices for organising a research project and which tools to use for in-depth descriptions of images.
The next presentation was given by Stefan Krebs, the project lead of the Public History Project: Minett Stories. Minett Stories is a web-based public history project that uses different approaches to engage with the transformation of the Luxemburg steel industry in the Belval region. The main page has different pictures organised into mosaics, referred to by the team as ‘pebbles’. Upon clicking, these pebbles function as doorways to various stories, biographies, and pages that a user can explore. The user can view a conventional drop-down menu to navigate the website if preferred. Stefan highlighted the various online graphic novels which allow the user to access personal stories of people who came as migrant workers to the steel mills or the locals whose lives changed dramatically when the mills started to shut down. He then discussed the tensions that emerge when a project necessitates coordination between a diverse set of working professionals. One remarkable example was the friction caused when the graphic novel artist needed to limit his artistic freedom to fit the historical source-based information. The narrow line between storytelling and sticking to the sourced-based biographies of the protagonists was a constant topic of discussion for the interdisciplinary team of web developers, artists, and historians.
Stefan Krebs's presentation as the project lead was expanded by another presentation from Daniel Richter, whose PhD was part of the project. Daniel explained the glitches and challenges of developing a unique website catering to an interested non-professional audience. He also discussed the difficulties of simultaneously juggling a traditional thesis and a public history project.
Another fascinating public history project, Historesch Gesinn, was presented by its project manager Joëlla van Donkersgoed. The project aims to engage the local communities of Esch-sur-Alzette and build a bridge between historians and local communities. One of the ideas behind the project was to provide an alternative to the history writing of a neighbourhood and community solely by the social elite by the social elite. Joëlla argued that such histories narrow the perspectives and experiences that are remembered or made to be remembered. The project covers different topics and regions ranging from deindustrialisation to the local history of a neighbourhood in Luxembourg City, including online exhibitions, local events with the communities and community-based creation of memorial sites.
Moving from practice to theory, Sofia Papastamkou presented the digital learning platform Ranke.2, an online platform similar to Coursera, which offers free courses for historians interested in digital sources and tools. The website offers classes about ‘A Guide to Collecting Tweets with Netlytic’ to a class called ‘The Web as a Historical Source’, covering numerous avenues for historians to gain relevant knowledge and training. Sofia, who is responsible for project and editorial coordination at Ranke.2 discussed the transformation since the rise of the internet and digital sources and how historians should adapt their source methodology to analyse new digital sources.
An excellent example of new sources and the difficulties they might present was discussed in the data visualisation workshop by the PhD student Aida Horaniet Ibañez, who briefly introduced data visualisation. We then split into groups to visualise different data sets. This led to great results, ranging from a group presenting their data as a dance performance to another group using the rings from all conference members, a staircase and paper stripes, which they wrapped around each ring to visualise the divorce rates across different years. We then moved on to a podcasting session hosted by Hanna Siemaszko, a successful science podcaster in Luxemburg. Here, we got excellent recommendations on how to start our first podcast, from a primary mic set-up to some practice settings on postproduction workflows. Then, two summer school participants tried an interview, which we analysed as a group. We then moved on to the digital space with Professor Sandra Camarda, who specialises in Transmedia Storytelling. Sandra gave us an overview of the current historical video game industry. Following this, we tried our hands on our own narrative-driven game using the open-source software Twine. At the end of the session, some groups presented their games which allowed us to experience an Inglorious Bastards-inspired Nazi hunt in Luxemburg City to early 20th-century pub tours in London.
Every day of the conference, we also had lightning talk sessions where the summer school attendees presented their research projects. These were further discussed at the end of a panel or during the frequent coffee breaks. We also had a city tour of Luxemburg city, which ended in exploring local breweries in Luxemburg’s oldest districts. On the last day, we explored the old furnace in Belval, which was just a stone's throw away from the conference hall.
Overall, the Europast summer school was a unique experience that allowed the participants to explore different themes within the field of public history, engage with the vibrant interdisciplinary community at the C2DH, and explore the unique area of the former of Luxemburg steel production.