Elucidating the blurred lines of the national historical imagination. The narrative allure of Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword in 1933–1934 Poland

peer reviewedThe novel With Fire and Sword by Henry Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) is an example of the interweaving of fiction, historiography and national collective imagination. It was written at the end of the period of Polish partition (1882–1888) and deals with events that marked the history and the collective imaginations of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews: the history of the Khmel’nyts’kyy Uprising (1648–1657). The epic nature of these historical events already carried the seeds of a powerful and emotional narrative that lends itself to mythicization. However, the reading of this book in a later situation, the Second Polish Republic (1921–1939), led the Polish Sanacja government to withdraw it from the compulsory reading in Polish schools in 1932. This aspect of the Jędrzejewicz school reform sparked a lively debate in the Polish press, whereby historians, literature scholars and journalists discussed the function that this book should have in the patriotic education of young Polish citizens, against the backdrop of tensions between the state and the political opposition on the issue of minorities, namely the Ukrainian minority. This discussion discloses the central place that Sienkiewicz has been given in Polish culture. At the same time, it examines the position that Polish intellectuals attribute to the Ukrainian minority in the Polish state and culture

Olgierd Górka’s Polemics on the Contours of the Polish Nation (1933- 1955)

peer reviewedOlgierd Górka was a historian specialized in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe who took actively part in the political debate concerning the place of minorities in Poland. He occupied different roles in the public sphere and appeared to have insistently tried to embody the voice of politically marginalised citizens of Poland. Olgierd Górka argued for a strong link between the Polish state and its citizens as a precondition for their mutual survival. His life exemplifies the discussion around the definition of the people, at the heart of the legitimation of modern nation-states in Central Europe during the 20th century. The debate initiated by Olgierd Górka helps to better understand how the modern Polish state, born from the ashes of three empires, defined Polish citizenship and how it evolved during the upheavals of the interwar and the post-war period

Grasping the Anti-Modern Discourse on Europe in the Swiss Digitised Press, or can Text Mining Generate a Research Corpus from an Article Collection?

peer reviewedIn this paper, we discuss how different types of automatic annotation of digitised newspaper articles can be integrated into the iterative questioning of the source material and the creation of research corpora out of a collection of unstructured texts (kept in a structured collection). We annotate a sizeable collection of Swiss press articles (183,270), extracted via the impresso interface1 using topic modelling (MALLET)2 as well as a naïve Bayes classifier (script by Milan van Lange). The methodological discussion we propose is to explore how text mining can help identify historical discourses that are difficult to query with keywords because of their inherent ambiguity and how to grasp them in a large corpus. We argue that the automated annotations can provide a body of corroborating evidence of the searched discourse, to be used as an intermediary and heuristic analysis step

Historical Newspaper User Interfaces: A Review

After decades of large-scale digitization, many historical newspaper collections are just one click away via online portals developed and supported by various public or private stakeholders. Initially offering access to full text search and facsimiles visualization only, historic newspaper user interfaces are increasingly integrating advanced exploration features based on the application of text mining tools to digitized sources. As gateways to enriched material, such interfaces are however not neutral and play a fundamental role in how users perceive historical sources, understand potential biases of upstream processes and benefit from the opportunities of datafication. What features can be found in current interfaces, and to what degree do interfaces adopt novel technologies? This paper presents a survey of interfaces for digitized historical newspapers with the aim of mapping the current state of the art and identifying recent trends with regard to content presentation, enrichment and user interaction. We devised 6 interface assessment criteria and reviewed twenty-four interfaces based on ca. 140 predefined features

Impresso Inspect and Compare. Visual Comparison of Semantically Enriched Historical Newspaper Articles

The automated enrichment of mass-digitised document collections using techniques such as text mining is becoming increasingly popular. Enriched collections offer new opportunities for interface design to allow data-driven and visualisation-based search, exploration and interpretation. Most such interfaces integrate close and distant reading and represent semantic, spatial, social or temporal relations, but often lack contrastive views. Inspect and Compare (I\&C) contributes to the current state of the art in interface design for historical newspapers with highly versatile side-by-side comparisons of query results and curated article sets based on metadata and semantic enrichments. I\&C takes search queries and pre-curated article sets as inputs and allows comparisons based on the distributions of newspaper titles, publication dates and automatically generated enrichments, such as language, article types, topics and named entities. Contrastive views of such data reveal patterns, help humanities scholars to improve search strategies and to facilitate a critical assessment of the overall data quality. I\&C is part of the impresso interface for the exploration of digitised and semantically enriched historical newspapers

Historical Newspaper Content Mining: Revisiting the impresso Project's Challenges in Text and Image Processing, Design and Historical Scholarship

impresso. Media Monitoring of the Past is an interdisciplinary research project in which a team of computational linguists, designers and historians collaborate on the datafication of a multilingual corpus of digitised historical newspapers. The primary goals of the project are to improve text mining tools for historical text, to enrich historical newspapers with (semi-) automatically generated data and to integrate such data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. In this paper we discuss our efforts to overcome inherent challenges and to integrate text mining and data visualisation applications in general historical research practices which are characterised by search operations as well as the need to create topical collections

impresso Text Reuse at Scale. An interface for the exploration of text reuse data in semantically enriched historical newspapers

Text Reuse reveals meaningful reiterations of text in large corpora. Humanities researchers use text reuse to study, e.g., the posterior reception of influential texts or to reveal evolving publication practices of historical media. This research is often supported by interactive visualizations which highlight relations and differences between text segments. In this paper, we build on earlier work in this domain. We present impresso Text Reuse at Scale, the to our knowledge first interface which integrates text reuse data with other forms of semantic enrichment to enable a versatile and scalable exploration of intertextual relations in historical newspaper corpora. The Text Reuse at Scale interface was developed as part of the impresso project and combines powerful search and filter operations with close and distant reading perspectives. We integrate text reuse data with enrichments derived from topic modeling, named entity recognition and classification, language and document type detection as well as a rich set of newspaper metadata. We report on historical research objectives and common user tasks for the analysis of historical text reuse data and present the prototype interface together with the results of a user evaluation

Communities, Harvesting, and CGIF: Building the Research Data Graph at NFDI4Culture

NFDI4Culture provides the Culture Knowledge Graph to facilitate FAIRness in its communities. It provides a lightweight infrastructure that interconnects research data from diverse domains such as architectural studies, art history, musicology, performing arts, and media studies. To allow further exploration of resources across individual knowledge silos, the graph is designed to be compatible with other research areas as well. It requires data providers to implement the Culture Graph Interchange Format, a subset of schema.org classes and properties, either as embedded metadata, an API, or a SPARQL endpoint that can be harvested, or as an RDF data dump. Connections between resources are established via controlled vocabularies, and ingested data is made available via the Culture Information Portal\u27s SPARQL endpoint. After introducing the infrastructural need, the paper reviews comparable solutions, describes the graph, discusses technical choices, and outlines our engagement within and beyond NFDI4Culture

Political Consulting in the Early Federal RepublicWhat role did the DGAP play in West German-Polish rapprochement?

DGAPanalyse 13Was ist Politikberatung, und was kann sie leisten? Ein Blick in das Archiv der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP) bietet hierzu interessante Erkenntnisse. Am Beispiel der Entwicklung der „Neuen Ostpolitik“ ab Mitte der 1960er Jahre geht Estelle Bunout der Frage nach, welche Rolle die DGAP im politischen Austausch- und Meinungsbildungsprozess in den deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen gespielt hat.What is political consulting, and what can it achieve? A look in the archives of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) provides some interesting insights. Using the example of developments in Germany’s “New Eastern Policy” from the mid-1960s, Estelle Bunout pursues the question of what role the DGAP played in the political exchange and opinion making process in West German-Polish relations

Embedded Revisions? Past Relations with Eastern Europe at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) (1947–1965)

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