Call for papers : Research and Education in Urban History (Dresden, 30-31 Mar 17)

Call for papers : Research and Education in Urban History (Dresden, 30-31 Mar 17)

Submission deadline: January 15th 2017

Internet : click here

Workshop description : Urban history, drawing on architectural heritage and cultural history, is one of the key areas in digital humanities. Regarding to that research interest, digital libraries play an important role, especially for visual media like photographs, paintings, or drawings, but also for physical and virtual models. Due to the wide field of possible research, different approaches, methods and technologies have emerged – and are still emerging.
For a long time funding priorities for digital cultural heritage in general—and digital supported research on urban history in the EU and in Germany in particular—focused primarily on technological aspects. These included cost minimization, the ease of use of software tools for creating digital 3D reconstructions and specific cases of application. One focus has been on digital research environments for the digital humanities. While DARIAH and CLARIN develop and operate virtual research environments for humanities scholars, especially for text-related research approaches, projects like DC-NET or ERA-NET focus on e-infrastructures for preserving cultural heritage. ARIADNE and associated projects are dedicated to supporting archaeological information management on a European level. Complementing these, the EUROPEANA virtual library and its sub-projects are dedicated digital repositories for digital cultural heritage assets in Europe, which collect and aggregate resources from museums, libraries, and archives.
Regarding the role of digital libraries and repositories as main facilitators, previous funding programs have not sufficiently considered the fact that digitally supported urban history research is conducted and applied in complex socio-technical arrangements. Against this background, a paradigm shift has taken place in funding politics since 2010. Besides a further development of technical infrastructures like research environments and digital repositories, human resources, transnational knowledge exchange and cooperation, social and economic impacts, valorization and dissemination are increasingly important objects of funding. Basically, an evaluation of the FP5-7 research funding programs stated that “foster the dissemination, transfer and take-up of program results” would be seen—in these programs—as an underrepresented issue.¹ The Horizon 2020 work program aims for “an understanding of Europe’s intellectual basis,” the use of “new technologies […] as they enable new and richer interpretations of our common European culture while contributing to sustainable economic growth,”² and the development of innovative research infrastructures to foster research, education, and publication of “knowledge-based resources such as collections [or] archives […]” to a European audience.

Pascal Fort

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