Seminars on digital humanities “digital archives for the history of the shoah: research prospects and challenges for the future”
For the Digital History and Culture series | Seminars on Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities (FBK-ICT) and the Italian-German Historical Institute (FBK-ISIG) invite you to the meeting:
Seminars on digital humanities “digital archives for the history of the shoah: research prospects and challenges for the future”
Digital archives for the history of the Shoah are now quite numerous; in Europe as well as in the United States, online publishing experiences of sophisticated databases and digitized documentary sources are increasingly multiplying, all with the main goal of making web search tools and document collections available to web users. The most important result of these projects, that can sometimes be impressive, is the accessibility to a number of resources that until a few years ago was unimaginable; on the other hand, they reflect the persistence of a state of “isolation” typical of such projects, a fragmentation and a redundancy of information that, rather than facilitating research, makes it more difficult and cumbersome. The purpose of the seminar is to illustrate two projects that, albeit on different scales and methods, go in the opposite direction, that of data integration and sharing. In particular, the projects of the Digital Library of Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, the Foundation for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, in Milan and the web portal of the Holocaust Research Infrastructure European project will be illustrated. The seminar will be an opportunity to show, also with examples, the benefits of using semantic web technologies. In this regard, particular attention will be paid to the search for the names of the victims of the Shoah and to the advantages of displaying data in Linked Open Data format.
Laura Brazzo is the manager of the historical archive of Milan-based Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea CDEC. A graduate in History at the University of Milan, she earned a Political Science PhD in History of European Integration from the University of Pavia. For the CDEC Foundation, where she has worked since 2004, she designed and followed the LOD project for the integration of the archives and the publishing of the Digital Library, winner of the 2015 LODLAM (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, Museum) Grand Prize. Along with the CDEC Foundation, she has been actively participating in the EHRI – European Holocaust Research Infrastructure European project since 2015. Since 2010, she has been the managing editor for the QUEST Issues in Contemporary Jewish History online magazine, of which she was the creator and promoter.