Workshop Public History and the Media, February 2015

The IFPH-FIHP,  together with the NCPH and other associations and cultural institutions, sponsors an important workshop on Public History which will take place at the History and Civilisation Department, European University Institute, in Florence-Fiesole, Italy, 11th, 12th and 13th February 2015. The goals of the workshop, the name of the participants and the full programme are published below. Two professors in the History and Civilization Department at the EUI shared the scientific organisation with the responsible of this blog: Prof. Luca Molà and Prof. Lucy Riall. Sandra Toffolo, project manager for  European History Primary Sources coordinates the administration of the workshop.  Who is, in general, interested by Public History, the interconnection between the discipline and the media, the differences between academic and public history, the public history job market and digital public history issues, is warmly encouraged to attend this workshop open  freely to everybody.

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Public History and the Media

Photography by Serge Noiret for the Workshop "Public History and the Media" (San Francisco - March 2014)

In recent decades, public enthusiasm for history and popular engagement with the past has grown dramatically. The popularity of history is manifested most visibly in the proliferation of television documentaries and historical dramas but it is also discernible in the rebirth of the historical novel, the organization of large-scale commemorations of historical anniversaries, the development of new historical museums and exhibitions, re-enactments and living history activities and the emergence of public history as a separate field of academic study. Digitization has also brought history and historical research to the broader public in hitherto unconceivable ways. Yet, for the most part, and with some notable exceptions, academic historians have remained extraneous to these developments, and their relationship to the public is different from that of public historians.

Is this difference between academic and public historians only about different professional ambitions, separate audiences and a different use of communication media? While it is not possible to become a public historian without an academic background, it is possible to be an academic historian without engaging in public history. Both are professional historians working with the past: their roles and their audiences are complementary although their practices are different in terms of methodology and forms of communication. Moreover, the development of public history raises questions about historical interpretation and the political use of the past that concern all historians, and should provoke a debate about ownership of the past in which both academic and public historians have much to contribute.

This workshop will take place at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and is organised by the History and Civilisation Department, The Historical Archives of the European Union and the Max Weber Programme’s Academic Careers Observatory. The scientific organizers, Luca Molà, Serge Noiret and Lucy Riall, brought together a number of leading practitioners in the field of public history and the media to discuss the current state of the field and in order to explore the relationship between public history and academic history. The first day of the workshop will be given over to exploring the relationship between history and media culture, with panels on oral history, publishing and teaching, films and the phenomenon of so-called ‘media dons’. The second day will focus on digital public history tools, practices and narratives. The third day will deal with the history of public history in the USA, discuss public history as an alternative career and look at public history in museums and exhibitions.

Photography by Serge Noiret: Florence from the Badia Fiesolana, European University Institute

Day 1 - Wednesday 11 February 2015 – Villa Schifanoia, Sala Europa

8.30-9.00        Registration (Sala Bandiere)

9.00-9.30         Welcome and Introduction

9.30-11.00      Session 1 - Oral History

Chair: Luisa Passerini (EUI)

‘L’Archivio degli Iblei’ and ‘Terramatta’: Sharing Memories Publically - Chiara Ottaviano (Cliomedia Officina, Turin)

Oral History and Video Performance - Giovanni Contini Bonacossi (Associazione Italiana Storia Orale)

‘Italy in a Day’ by Gabriele Salvatores: The First Italian User Generated Film - Ilaria Castiglioni (Indiana Production, Milan)

 11.00-11.30    Coffee Break

 11.30-13.00    Session 2 - Publishing

Chair: Lucy Riall (EUI)

Big History: Making New History Books into Major Events - Simon Winder (Penguin)

From Written to Live History: A Publisher’s Experience - Giuseppe Laterza (Laterza Editore)

13.00-14.30    Lunch

14.30-16.00    Session 3 - Teaching Public History and the Use of Textbooks

Chair: Stéphane Van Damme (EUI)

Inventing Europe: Teaching Europe Through the Lens of Technology - Suzanne Lommers (Foundation for the History of Technology)

 Master Narratives and History Education: Wasn’t the Spanish Reconquest Actually a Conquest? - Mario Carretero (EUI & Universidad Autonoma Madrid)

Teaching Digital Public History - Enrica Salvatori (Università degli Studi di Pisa)

16.00-16.15    Break

16.15-17.15    Session 4 - TV and Radio

Chair: Youssef Cassis (EUI)

Broadcasting History: The Constraints and Possibilities of the Medium - Luca Molà (EUI) and Lucy Riall (EUI) in conversation with Amanda Vickery (Queen Mary University of London)

17.15-17.45    Coffee Break

17.45-20.15     Rai Fiction Film: Un mondo nuovo - Altiero Spinelli

Introduction

Pier Virgilio Dastoli (Consiglio Italiano del Movimento Europeo) and Alberto Negrin (Director)

Projection of the Film (with English subtitles)

Q & A

 Day 2 - Thursday 12 February 2015 – Historical Archives of the  European Union, Villa Salviati

9.00-9.45        Keynote Lecture - What is Digital Public History? - Mark Tebeau (Arizona State University)

9.45-11.15      Session 5 - Digital Public History Narratives

Chair: Rebecca Conard (Middle Tennessee State University)

Urban Media Archive in the City of Lviv: From Collecting to Engaging - Bohdan  Shumylovych (EUI & Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe)

CENDARI: The Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure for the Study of WW1 and Medieval Culture - Andrea Buchner (University of Birmingham)

From the War to the Web: Crossing Borders with the Europeana 1914-1918 Project - Ad Pollé (Europeana)

11.15-11.45    Coffee Break

11.45-13.15    Session 6 - Digital Archives

Chair: Dieter Schlenker (EUI-Historical Archives of the European Union)

The Medici Archive: Private Collection and Public Use - Alessio Assonitis (The Medici Archive Project)

The Venice Time Machine Project - Frédéric Kaplan (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

13.15-15.00    Lunch

15.00-16.30    Session 7 - Mobile and Time-Based History

Chair: Mark Tebeau (Arizona State University)

Memory Sharing and the New Media in Exhibiting Florence 1940-1944 - Valeria Galimi (Università della Tuscia)

Oral History Contents in the Web: The Memoro Archive - Luca Novarino (Memoro Project)

 In Susan Horner’s Florence - Alyson Price (The British Institute of Florence)

16.30-17.00    Coffee Break

17.00-18.30    Session 8 - European Narratives

Chair: Federico Romero (EUI)

Writing a New History of Europe - Frédéric Clavert (Labex EHNE, Paris)

Using EU Websites for the History of European Integration - Dieter Schlenker (EUI-Historical Archives of the European Union)

HistoGraph: Human and Machine Computation for European Integration Studies - Lars Wieneke (CVCE Luxembourg)

 Day 3 - Friday 13 February 2015 – Badia Fiesolana, Refectory

9.00-10.30      Session 9 - Public History in the USA

Chair: Serge Noiret (EUI)

The Pragmatic Turn in American Historical Thought and Public History Education in the United States - Rebecca Conard (Middle Tennessee State University)

Reflective Practice: Public History’s Signature Pedagogy - Patricia Mooney-Melvin (Loyola University Chicago)

Public History in the 21^st Century: Entrepreneurial Practice within a Shifting Professional Market - Patrick Moore (President National Council on Public History; University of West Florida, Pensacola; Historical Research Associates)

10.30-11.00    Coffee Break

Photography by Serge Noiret, Florence from Bagno a Ripoli

11.00-13.00     Session 10 - EUI HEC Alumni Roundtable

Which Kind of Public Historians Are We? Public History as an Alternative Job Market for EUI Alumni - 

Chair: Thomas Cauvin (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Speakers:

• Dan H. Andersen (Freelance Historian, Reenactor, and Writer, Copenhagen)
• Jozefien De Bock (Curator Project Migration, STAM -City Museum Ghent)
• Christine Dupont (European Parliament-House of History)
• Torsten Feys (Public History Programme Ghent University)
• Ciaran O’Scea (Curator, Irish and the Spanish Monarchy Exhibition, Archivo General de Simancas)
• Sven Mesinovic (Museumspädagoge (freelance) Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin)
• Markus J. Prutsch (European Parliament)
• Aurora Savelli (Portale ‘Storia di Firenze’)
• Sandra Toffolo (EUI-European History Primary Sources)
• Gerben Zaagsma (Project Anne Frank, Lichtenberg-Kolleg - the Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study)

13.00-14.30    Lunch

14.30-17.00     Session 11 - Museums and Exhibitions

Chair: Luca Molà (EUI)

Narrating Europe in a Museum? The House of European History - Étienne Deschamps (European Parliament)

Origins and Evolution of a Private Museum - Stefania Ricci (Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, Florence)

Museum-Based Research: The View from the Victoria & Albert - Bill Sherman (Victoria & Albert Museum) & Marta Ajmar (Victoria & Albert Museum)

17.00-17.30     Concluding Remarks and Coffee

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Scientific sponsors:

•  Medici Archive Project
•  Cliomedia Officina
•  Portale ‘Storia di Firenze’
•  The British Institute of Florence
• Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe
•  National Council on Public History
•  Centre virtuel de la connaissance de l’Europe
•  European History Primary Sources
•  International Federation for Public History
•  Museo Salvatore Ferragamo

Current Historiographical Research at the History and Civilisation Department, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

The Open Access e-journal Zeitenblicke 12 (2013), Nr. 1, is an interesting issue -based on interviews organised by EUI Ph.D. researchers and also single essays- dealing with the research community and activities in the History and Civilisation Department at the European University Institute  (EUI). These essays and interviews are showcasing and informing about the many intellectual challenges that are part of the daily activities of the EUI History department.

Zeitenblicke is part of the excellent Historicum.Net, a portal for the Historical Sciences on the Internet in Germany. Sehepunkte, a component of the portal, is the best place to look for book reviews in the field of history in Germany -all historical periods are included and interdisciplinary works are also reviewed-, and Lesepunkte, a third component of the portal, is a platform for history teachers. Historicum.net  is one of the best online history projects in Germany which is supported by the State Library of Bayern, the University of Cologne and many other German partners. Chronicon  is a sophisticated search engine which allows better knowledge of the portal’s complete contents. The only criticism that could be raised -but this is an important one- is that nothing, not even the basic descriptions of the different contents of the portal, has been translated into English for the purpose of informing better a worldwide community of interested historians. Internet is, above all, access to global knowledge and the language of such a worldwide communication is English today, a language that was indeed used for some of the papers published  in the Zeitenblicke's overview of the EUI History Department's research activities.

The issue is the result of an important initiative by some EUI history Ph.D. researchers. These promote the intellectual output and activities of the EUI History and Civilization Department dialogging with some EUI history department members, professors and former professors. In doing so, they reproduced in an online open access journal, the constant intellectual dialogue that is happening between all components of the Department, Ph.D. researchers, post-doctoral fellows, visiting scholars and professors, during the whole academic year.

The title of this Zeitenblicke monograph issue is "Current Historiographical Research at the European University Institute". Interviewers and authors of this issue are EUI Ph.D. researchers: Tilman Kulke, Moritz von Brescius, Robrecht Declercq and James White. They are the authors of a global introduction to this issue: Diversity in Unity: An Introduction to Historiography at the European University Institute.

Former EUI professors like Sebastian Conrad, Antonella Romano and Martin van Gelderen are interviewed together with the Head of the History Department, Federico Romero, Professor of History of Post-War European Cooperation and Integration and Jorge Flores, Professor of History of European Colonial and Post-Colonial Systems and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department. All the abstracts and the different interviews are publically accessible in Zeitenblicke:

• Interview über die Globalgeschichte mit Professor Sebastian Conrad. Fragen von Moritz von Brescius und Tilmann Kulke
  
• Doing Things with Intellectual History: An Interview with Martin van Gelderen By Brian Kjær Olesen, Jonas Gerlings, Kaarlo Havu, Daniel Knegt, Matti La Mela, and Thomas Ø. Wittendorff
  
• The Cultural History of Empire. An Interview with Professor Antonella Romano and Professor Jorge Flores by Moritz von Brescius
  
• International History at the EUI. An Interview with Professor Frederico Romero by Frank Gerits
  

The essays published in Zeitenblicke 12 (2013), Nr. 1 and completing this series of interviews are the following:

• Frank Gerits: An International Approach to the Cultural Cold War. French Public Diplomacy Towards Africa (1945-1965)
• Kaarlo Johannes Havu: Erasmus on Sovereignty, Politics and Rhetoric in Institutio principis Christiani
• Carolina Obradors Suazo: From Citizenship to Citizenry. Towards a cultural approach to the figure of the citizen in the 15th century Barcelona
• Brian Kjær Olesen: Entagled Positions. From Comparative and Transnational History to Histories of Possible Meanings
• Jan-Hendrik Schulz: Kontinuität und Scheitern sozialrevolutionärer Terrorismen in den 1980er Jahren- die französische Action Directe (AD) und die westdeutsche Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) im Vergleich

These papers, as all scholarly output of the History Department, are indexed in the EUI institutional repository, Cadmus:

• Diversity in unity : an introduction to historiography at the European University Institute, by Tilman KULKE, Moritz VON BRESCIUS, Robrecht DECLERCQ and James WHITE
• An international approach to the Cultural Cold War : French public diplomacy towards Africa (1945-1965), by Frank GERITS
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  Erasmus on sovereignty, politics and rhetoric in Institutio principis Christiani by Kaarlo Johannes HAVU
• From citizenship to citizenry : towards a cultural approach to the figure of the citizen in the 15th century Barcelona, by Carolina OBRADORS
• Entagled positions : from comparative and transnational history to histories of possible meanings, by Brian Kjær OLESEN
• Kontinuität und Scheitern sozialrevolutionärer Terrorismen in den 1980er Jahren- die französische Action Directe (AD) und die westdeutsche Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) im Vergleich, by Jan-Hendrik SCHULZ.

Symposium: "Reading historical sources in the digital age", 5–6 December 2013, Luxembourg, Call for Paper extended to September 4

This year the DHLU Symposium is the 3rd DIgital HUmanities Luxembourg conference. The PDF version of the CFP is available online and is published integrally below.

The Symposium will take place on the 5 and 6 December 2013 in Luxembourg. I already mentioned the past two editions of DHLU in Digital & Public History, and the publication by Peter Lang, this summer 2013, of an edited book with papers presented during the first DHLU Symposium in 2009.

This new Call For Papers integrates three different approaches to the use of primary sources, secondary sources and to the process of writing history in the digital age: 

• Distant/close reading (Data retrieval, analysis and visualization); 
• Community reading 
• Writing history &amp and Assessing scholarship. 

The CFP was open until the 20th of August but has now been extended until the 4th of September. 

DHLU 2013 -http://www.digitalhumanities.lu/- is organized by the CVCE, together with the Jean Monnet Chair in History of European Integration (University of Luxembourg, FLSHASE) and its research programme ‘Digital Humanities Luxembourg’ — DIHULUX (research unit Identités-Politiques-Sociétés-Espaces (IPSE)) — and the University of Luxembourg’s Master’s in Contemporary European History. 

"The Symposium will be structured around the following research clusters, but may also include other related approaches. 

After the inaugural DHLU Symposium in 2009 that focused on ‘Contemporary history in the digital age’ and a second edition which tackled the methodological and theoretical implications of considering websites as primarysources (March 2012), this third edition will focus on the use of online thematic research corpora.

Given that more and more sources for contemporary history are being made available online as digital research corpora — as on the CVCE’s site — and following on from the first two editions which examined the methods used to develop these sources, this third edition of Digital Humanities Luxembourg will focus on the various ways in which this material is used by humanities researchers, particularly contemporary historians and more specifically specialists in European integration.

Distant/close reading — Data retrieval, analysis and visualization

As increasing quantities of historical data are published on the web, the prospect of making simple use of these data — i.e. reading PDFs on screen or printing them out to read on paper — is becoming increasingly less realistic and methodologically sustainable. What options are open to researchers, and what are the concomitant methodological issues? This cluster will cover various themes, including: (big) data, text mining and semantic analysis, quantitative data approaches, network analysis, data visualisation (including GIS), and more generally the links between distant and close readings.

Community reading

Several online digital thematic collections, and more generally many online services available for research, offer users the possibility of registering, and sometimes of working together with other researchers, either directly or indirectly. This can lead to a collaborative and interactive reading of historical sources. Moreover, given the proliferation of these collections, what challenges and opportunities exist for cooperation and interoperability between communities? What consequences will this have on the way we currently conduct research in the humanities?

Writing history & Assessing scholarship

Once researchers begin to use digital thematic collections, will it change the way they write history? This cluster will include practical papers (e.g. on how to cite digital resources) as well as more theoretical ones. It will also embrace issues relating to the validity and quality of data and research outputs based on digital thematic collections, as well as the evaluation of those collections as a new kind of online scholarly publication.

We welcome papers focusing on digital humanities and social sciences from researchers and scholars at all stages of their careers. Papers examining cases related to European integration studies (EIS) are especially encouraged. Abstracts (max. 500 words), submitted together with a short CV (max. 250 words) and a list of publications, can be written in English or French and should be sent to the following contact email address, which can also be used for any enquiries: symposium.dhlu@cvce.eu.

The authors of the selected proposals will be invited to present their contributions in French or English at the DHLU Symposium 2013, to be held in Luxembourg, and their papers will be published in the Symposium proceedings (only English versions of the revised full papers will be accepted for publication). Participation costs will be covered up to a set limit.

Scientific committee

- Claire Clivaz (University of Lausanne)
- René Leboutte (University of Luxembourg)
- Claudine Moulin (Trier University)
- Serge Noiret (European University Institute, Florence)
- Stéfan Sinclair (McGill University)
- Marianne Backes (CVCE)

Coordination: 

Lars Wieneke (CVCE)
symposium.dhlu@cvce.eu