The Transformative Promise of Digital Humanities 1 joris van eijnatten, toine pieters and jaap verheul This article discusses the promises and challenges of digital humanities methodologies for historical inquiry. In order to address the great outstanding question whether big data will re-invigorate macro-history, a number of research projects are described that use cultural text mining to explore big data repositories of digitised newspapers. The advantages of quantitative analysis, visualisation and named entity recognition in both exploration and analysis are illustrated in the study of public debates on drugs, drug trafficking, and drug users in the early twentieth century (wahsp), the comparative study of discourses about heredity, genetics, and eugenics in Dutch and German newspapers, 1863-1940 (biland) and the study of trans-Atlantic discourses (Translantis). While many technological and practical obstacles remain, advantages over traditional hermeneutic methodology are found in heuristics, analytics, quantitative trans-disciplinarity, and reproducibility, offering a quantitative and trans-national perspective on the history of mentalities.
According to recent literature, the idea of Europe as it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided closely with the concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’. This article examines this claim by testing the existence of modernity, civilization and Europe as a conceptual ‘trinity’ by using digital history techniques. Word frequencies, collocations and word embeddings are employed to analyze four Dutch newspapers (Algemeen Handelsblad, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, De Telegraaf, De Leeuwarder Courant) spanning the period 1840–1990. It transpires that semantic relations between the three elements are hardly visible; in so far as they appear, they hardly constitute a close-knit ‘trinity’. Alternating combinations among the three components were more significant than direct connections between all three, while ‘the West’ was more central than Europe. These findings suggest that popular media like newspapers have a different take on culturalpolitical concepts than writings by the intellectual elite.
In this opening article, the editors of History, Culture and Modernity provide an overview of recent debates relating to "modernity", inviting prospective authors to participate in a reflexive conversation on this contested concept, which is, at the same time, a practical reality. Modernity is on endless trial, suggesting evaluation and permanent criticism. The most disputed aspects of modernity range from its supposedly secular character and its strong connection to western science. Responses to these and other conspicuous features of modernity include Romanticism and various critiques of Enlightenment rationality, but also artistic modernism and the postcolonial attack on Eurocentrism. New approaches to the study of modernity try to accept its ambiguity, rather than reaffirm the conventional binary approach, and pay more attention to global and experiential aspects. A cultural history of modernity can help to expand such new approaches.
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