Internship at C2DH | Anastasiya Kholyavka and Roksolyana Holovata

This year, as part of the cooperation between the Center for Urban History and The Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), two of our colleagues have been doing an internship in Luxembourg and shared their experience.

In September, Anastasiya Kholyavka, an archivist and the head of the Urban Media Archive, interned at C2DH. In line with her professional interests in digital archiving, she got acquainted with teams that digitize archival and library collections and use them in educational or research projects. Andy O'Dwyer, head of the Digital History Lab and digitization specialist, shared his experience in preserving audiovisual materials. Andy's team faces the challenges of making archives accessible, so in addition to digitization, they are exploring the possibilities of tools for working with large digital archives, for example, offering access to materials through the Nainuwa platform. The Digital History Laboratory offers equipment for digitizing and cleaning books, periodicals, and manuscripts.

The Digital Research Infrastructure team, together with Professor Marten Düring, presented their approaches to digital history projects, including the impresso project. It offers new methods of working with analog media that empower historians. Numerous press collections have been digitized for this project, but thanks to natural language processing tools, they are not just a large digital archive, but are available for search, processing, and interpretation.

In October and November, our researcher and historical editor of the online encyclopedia Lviv Interactive, Roksolyana Holovata, also visited the Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg. 

It was important for Roksolyana to get acquainted with C2DH's digital history projects, and she also had the opportunity to present the experience of Lviv Interactive. This project has been running for about 15 years, and in discussions with C2DH colleagues, Roksoliana discussed how to ensure the digital sustainability of the project in the future. In general, the conversations at C2DH deepened the conversation of the Lviv Interactive team in discussions about the vision of the project in the long term.

In addition, as part of the Lviv Interactive project, the team plans to develop databases of actors in various urban environments of Lviv in the 19th and 20th centuries. To realize this idea, the researcher learned about the most appropriate tools, including visualization, during her internship. 

Roksolyana describes her experience at C2DH as very valuable in terms of building research networks in digital history with her Luxembourg colleagues. It helps not only the Center's team to gain new knowledge, but also to make Ukrainian projects more visible in the field.

We appreciate our cooperation, as such working visits and opportunities to learn about the activities of other institutions from the inside allow us not only to establish stronger ties for further cooperation, but also to share experiences, especially in the field of digital humanities, which has only recently begun to take shape and already raises many questions about methodology, technology, and project sustainability.

Credits

Cover Image: photo by Roksolyana Holovata

Gallery: photos by Roksolyana Holovata, Anastasiya Kholyavka