Border Experiences in Europe. Everyday Life - Working Life - Communication - Languages

For a decade now, borders in Europe have been back on the political agenda. Border research has responded and is breaking new ground in thinking about and exploring borders. This book follows this development and strengthens a perspective that is interested in life realities and that focuses on everyday cultural experiences of borders. The authors reconstruct such experiences in the context of different forms of migration and mobility as well as language contact situations and are sensitive to the freedom of the participants. In this way, they empirically identify everyday cultural usage or appropriation strategies of borders as vastly different experiences of borders. The readers of this volume will gain insights into current developments in border research and life realities in Europe where borders are (made) relevant. With contributions by Christian Wille, Birte Nienaber, Carsten Yndigegn, Isabelle Pigeron-Piroth, Rachid Belkacem, Ursula Roos, Elisabeth Boesen, Ariela House, Ignacy Jóźwiak, Corinne Martin, Erika Kalocsányiová, Xosé-Afonso Álvarez, Konstanze Jungbluth, Florian Dost, Nicole Richter, Dominik Gerst.Seit einem Jahrzehnt stehen Grenzen in Europa wieder auf der politischen Agenda. Die Grenzforschung hat darauf reagiert und schlägt neue Wege ein, um Grenzen zu denken und zu untersuchen. Das Buch folgt dieser Entwicklung und macht eine Perspektive stark, die sich für Lebenswirklichkeiten interessiert und die alltagskulturelle Erfahrung der Grenze in den Blick rückt. Die Autor_innen rekonstruieren solche Erfahrungen im Kontext verschiedener Migrations- und Mobilitätsformen sowie Sprachkontaktsituationen und sind sensibel für die Gestaltungsspielräume der Akteure. Auf diese Weise werden alltagskulturelle Gebrauchs- bzw. Aneignungsstrategien von Grenzen als höchst unterschiedliche Erfahrungen der Grenze empirisch herausgearbeitet. Die Leser des Bands bekommen Einblicke in aktuelle Entwicklungen der Grenzforschung und in Lebenswirklichkeiten in Europa, in denen Grenzen relevant (gemacht) werden. Mit Beiträgen von Christian Wille, Birte Nienaber, Carsten Yndigegn, Isabelle Pigeron-Piroth, Rachid Belkacem, Ursula Roos, Elisabeth Boesen, Ariela House, Ignacy Jóźwiak, Corinne Martin, Erika Kalocsányiová, Xosé-Afonso Álvarez, Konstanze Jungbluth, Florian Dost, Nicole Richter, Dominik Gers

Digital History and Hermeneutics

For doing history in the digital age, we need to investigate the “digital kitchen” as the place where the “raw” is transformed into the “cooked”. The novel field of digital hermeneutics provides a critical and reflexive frame for digital humanities research by acquiring digital literacy and skills. The Doctoral Training Unit "Digital History and Hermeneutics" is applying this new digital practice by reflecting on digital tools and methods

Materiality of TEI Encoding and Decoding: An Analysis of the Western European Union Archives on Armament Policy

By combining traditional historical enquiry with TEI XML encoding and decoding in a corpus analysis phase, the project aims at addressing research questions mainly related to the French and British positions on the topics of armament design and production and of armament control within the Western European Union (WEU) from 1954 to 1982. The paper focuses on the annotation of speakers (different countries and institutional representatives) and their discourse in a selection of institutional documents (minutes, notes, studies, memoranda) (encoding phase) and the identification of linguistic patterns on armament issues in their discourse, as well as the interpretation of results (decoding phase). From a larger perspective, the study considers the TEI encoding as adding to the original text a “material” layer that further supports both machine and human interpretation (decoding). In this sense, this study may move closer to the concept of “material hermeneutics,” by understanding code, and digital technology in general, as an instrument we can use in hermeneutic ways to produce knowledge

Prewar Public Discourse: Letters to Politika, Belgrade, 1988–1991

We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4,000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combined lexicon-based tools of automated topic and sentiment analysis with data on the sociodemographic characteristics of the letter writers and their localities. The results of our analysis show the importance of the politicisation of a history of violence in shaping public discourse in the run-up to war