The GHI Washington established the blog Href in 2018 in conjunction with the start of the DFG-funded relaunch of German History in Documents and Images under the leadership of the founding editors Kelly McCullough, GHDI’s project manager, and Atiba Pertilla, research fellow and digital editor at the GHI. Katharina Hering, digital project librarian, joined the blog’s editorial team later that year. The goal of Href has been to showcase the use of digitized primary source materials, broadly conceived, for studying, teaching, and researching German and global history. Href proved to be particularly timely during the pandemic, when it offered a forum for authors, many of whom were remote or on-site interns at the GHI, to reflect about the opportunities and challenges of researching German history in a global context remotely.
Articles have covered a wide range of topics, ranging from descriptions and analyses of new online portals and resources, such as Linda Rath’s Historical Newspapers. The Zeit.Punkt NRW-Portal (September 22, 2022), Götz Lachwitz’s Online access to historical German TV programs: Reflections on the research potential of unique audiovisual sources (October 22, 2022), Href has also shared essays on the process and ethical consequences of researching digitized collections and archives, such as Lara Raabe’s Reflections on Reflections on Researching Digitized Personal Files of Sinti and Roma Created by Berlin’s Criminal Police in Nazi Germany (July 12, 2022) or Janna Katharina Müller’s article on her research focusing on the very first monthly astronomical journal in Germany: The Celestial Police and their structures of communication (September 7, 2021). It has also published methodological pieces on tools and digital methods, such as Maximilien Gudenberg’s article Navigating the Challenges of OCR-based Research in the Arabic Script and Language (July 12, 2023) and Simon Krahé’s Reflections on the Process of Network Analysis Dataset Creation Using Line Content Classification with Python (December 15, 2023). Notable href posts have also include several original interviews, including Tim Feind’s interview with Beth Lander, who has served as the Managing Director of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) since 2020.
With the participation of the GHI Washington in the NFDI 4Memory Consortium, an initiative dedicated to the creation of a long-term and sustainable research data infrastructure in Germany, we’ve decided to re-conceptualize Href as a forum where some of the discussions sparked by the 4Memory community, particularly its emphases on “Data Literacy” and “Data Culture,” can be continued and broadened. In line with the traditional role of the GHI as a transatlantic and trans-national bridge, Href continues to be directed at a US and Canada-based audience that is not yet familiar with NFDI4Memory.
The new edition of Href will be organized into three series:
1) One new series, developed in collaboration with Christiane Weber from the VDH (Association of Historians in Germany), will be titled “Hätte ich das mal eher gewusst … Was Historiker:innen und historisch Arbeitende mit digitalen Ansätzen ihrem jüngeren Ich raten würden.” This series will feature short interviews with emerging scholars discussing their experiences with digital tools and methods and will be predominantly in German. The first post in the series, an interview will Holle Meding, Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Latin American Studies, will be published on March 1. We hope to share new interviews at least once a month.
2) The other new series will be a forum reflecting on Critical Data Literacy in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This series will include short articles and interviews related to a group bibliography on Critical Data Literacy that is currently being organized in collaboration with students in information science from the TU Darmstadt. The bibliography is being put together using the Zotero platform and can be found here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/5121403/4memory_data_literacy
This series will also provide a forum for occasional conference reports, and as a platform to support the preparation of the textbook Historical Data Criticism and Sustainable RDM which will be produced as part of the 4Memory’s “Data Literacy” project.
3) The third series continues in our established Href tradition and will offer a forum for reflections about digitized primary source materials in studying, teaching, and researching German and global history. The Href team welcomes inquiries for potential submissions.
Contact: Katharina Hering: hering@ghi-dc.org
Thanks to Atiba Pertilla, Christiane Weber, Kelly McCullough, and Daniel Burckhardt for their helpful feedback and revisions of an earlier draft of this editorial note.